One must care about a world one will not see.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of considering the future and the well-being of others, even if we won't personally witness the results of our actions.
Bertrand Russell's quote speaks to the moral responsibility we have towards future generations and the world we leave behind. It suggests that an ethical life involves caring for the greater good beyond our personal experiences, highlighting the interconnectedness of human existence. By urging individuals to think about a world they will not see, it challenges us to act with foresight and compassion for others who will inhabit that world. This perspective encourages a mindset of selflessness and global responsibility.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, one might use this quote to inspire collective action for the environment.
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.
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.
A word of the faith that never balks,_x000D_ _x000D_ Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely._x000D_ _x000D_ It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all,_x000D_ _x000D_ That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all.
This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist - chauvinist - when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound.
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
If there is no other life, then this one has been enough to make it worth being born myself...a human being.
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