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.
When you're operating on uninvestigated theories of what's going on and you aren't even aware of it, you're in what I call "the dream." Often the dream becomes troubling; sometimes it even turns into a nightmare. At times like these, you may want to test the truth of your theories by doing The Work on them. The Work always leaves you with less of your uncomfortable story. Who would you be without it? How much of your world is made up of unexamined stories? You'll never know until you inquire.
I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.
Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him ... His subconscious knew what his min did not guess-that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke.
Be like a flower that gives its fragrance even to the hand that crushed it.
We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
Both what you run from-_x000D_ and what you yearn for -_x000D_ are within you.
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