Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.
Interpretation
High-minded individuals often prioritize ideals over personal happiness, including the happiness of others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell suggests that those who are truly high-minded or possess noble ideals may not place significant importance on happiness—either their own or that of others. Such individuals are often more focused on principles, ethics, and the broader implications of actions rather than seeking or fostering joy, which can lead to a certain indifference towards emotional well-being.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the relationship between ethics and happiness in a philosophy class.
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.
Spiritual principles do not change, but we do.
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.
If there is no other world and there is no fruit and ripening of actions well done or ill done, then here and now in this life I shall be free from hostility, affliction, and anxiety, and I shall live happily.
Transcendence constitutes selfhood.
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.
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