If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
Interpretation
True happiness in philosophy must stem from compassion, not from envy or resentment towards others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell critiques the motivations behind Marx's ideology, suggesting that a genuine philosophy aimed at happiness should be rooted in kindness and understanding rather than a desire for the suffering of others. He implies that Marx's focus on the proletariat's happiness was undermined by a disdain for the bourgeois, which detracted from the true essence of a philosophy that should promote universal well-being.
In practice
In a lecture discussing ethical philosophies, one might quote Russell to illustrate the importance of compassion in philosophical thought.
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.
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.
The rich are different from us.
The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.
Neutrality is for referees in a football game. You have to take a stand. The really, really good journalists always take a stand with those who have no power, with those who have no rights, and with those who have no voice.
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
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