I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Interpretation
Believing without evidence can be harmful and unwarranted.
Bertrand Russell challenges the practice of accepting beliefs or propositions without any evidence or justification. He warns that holding beliefs without a foundation in truth can lead to paradoxical and detrimental consequences, advocating instead for a rational approach to understanding and accepting ideas.
In practice
During a philosophical debate on the value of evidence in belief systems.
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.
(The difficulty over the question of eternal torments lies in) how it is irreconcilable with the Goodness of God, to put any Persons at all upon a necessity of making such an Option, wherein if they choose amiss, the Misery they incur must be irrevocable.
Night's candles have burned out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops." Hope tinged with melancholy - like life.
Heaven does without doing through its purity, Earth does without doing through its calmness.
Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.
I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.
If the philosophy of Christianity were lived, wars would cease, unhappiness would cease, economic problems would be solved, poverty would be wiped from the face of the earth, and man's inhumanity to man would be transmuted into a spirit of mutual helpfulness.
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