Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the dark thoughts about the transient nature of life while finding a strange comfort in observing human actions.
Bertrand Russell expresses a somewhat pessimistic view about the inevitability of life coming to an end. However, he finds a peculiar consolation in considering the myriad ways individuals engage with their lives, suggesting that although life may eventually cease, the actions and choices made by people hold meaning and significance in the present.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about existence and the meaning of life.
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.
One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.
For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.
How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.
There will be justice," said Brutha. "If there is no justice, there is nothing.
Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.
I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
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