Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.
Interpretation
Pleasure should be appreciated as long as it does not negatively impact others.
This quote by Bertrand Russell emphasizes the importance of evaluating our pleasures based on their effects on others. It suggests that enjoying experiences that do not cause harm to other people is inherently valuable, promoting a mindset of ethical consideration in pursuit of personal happiness.
In practice
In a discussion on ethical living, one might invoke this quote to advocate for personal joys that respect others.
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.
I'm almost like three people. There's me the, Dolly, the person. There's me, the star. And then there's me, the manager.
I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
Both angels and demons are ignorant of the future, yet they make predictions. The angels do so when God reveals the future to them and commands them to prophesy, and what they prophesy comes to pass. Demons also make predictions, but these are only guesses based on what they see from afar.
All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.
The definition of 'morbid' is an unhealthy preoccupation with death. Unfortunately, there's no word to mean the perfectly healthy preoccupation with death, which is what I have.
When we accept all of life's contradictions, when we can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing them both while getting stuck in neither, then we are free.
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