Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the core driving forces of Bertrand Russell's life: love, knowledge, and compassion for others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell highlights the three fundamental passions that have shaped his existence. He emphasizes the significance of love and knowledge as essential pursuits that provide meaning, while also expressing a deep empathy for the suffering experienced by humanity. This combination of personal longing and moral concern paints a picture of a life dedicated to both personal fulfillment and altruistic values.
In practice
This quote can inspire discussions about life choices during 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.
The New Testament writers speak as if Christ's achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the 'first fruits,' the pioneer of life,' He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.
Definitions.... are never really needed, and rarely of any use
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Meditation is such a more substantial reality than what we normally take to be reality.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
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