To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the challenge of finding motivation in virtue when tangible achievements seem absent.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell addresses the modern mindset that often prizes achievement and success over moral or virtuous living. He suggests that in contemporary life, it can be challenging for individuals to feel truly passionate or enthusiastic about leading a virtuous life if they perceive that such a life lacks tangible rewards or accomplishments, highlighting the tension between ethical living and societal values focused on achievement.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about ethics in modern society.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.
I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.
Delivered from the galling yoke of time.
We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we too would become Taliban.
The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.
There never can have been, and never can be, and there never shall be any sin without pride.
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