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.
I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn't exactly appreciated, at first.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Whatever we focus on is bound to expand. Where we see the negative, we call forth more negative. And where we see the positive, we call forth more positive. Having loved and lost, I now love more passionately. Having won and lost, I now win more soberly. Having tasted the bitter, I now savor the sweet.
Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom.
I never said I was an angel. Nor am I innocent or holy like the Virgin Mary. What I am is natural and serious and as sensitive as an open nerve on an ice cube.
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