It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of understanding natural laws over mere prayer or humility when seeking to influence outcomes.
Bertrand Russell suggests that simply relying on prayer and humility is not sufficient for achieving one's desires or influencing events. Instead, he advocates for the acquisition of knowledge, particularly of the natural laws governing the world, as the true means to bring about desired changes. This highlights a philosophical approach towards understanding and shaping reality through informed action rather than purely spiritual or emotional appeals.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth and the role of education.
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.
Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.
I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, 'Oh really? Why don't you go try - it's not easy.'
History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.
Fear only the will of God and you will have no cause to fear anyone else.
Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.
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