It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Interpretation
Our fixation on material possessions hinders us from achieving true freedom and dignity.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell reflects on the idea that an excessive focus on material wealth and possessions can become an obstacle to experiencing genuine freedom and living a noble life. It suggests that true liberation and nobility arise not from the accumulation of things but from a mindset that values experiences, relationships, and personal growth over material gain.
In practice
During a discussion on minimalism at a community event.
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.
To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.
To the ashes of the dead glory comes too late.
When the palace is magnificent, the fields are filled with weeds, and the granaries are empty.
If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.
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