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.
Ashram means a community of men of religion. I feel that an ashram was a necessity of life for me.
Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking)
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.
There is no way you can get people to believe you on screen if they know who you really are through television.
THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.
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