Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
Interpretation
Disdain for happiness often reflects a deeper disdain for others and humanity itself.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell suggests that when individuals express contempt for happiness, it often mirrors their underlying contempt for the happiness of others and, more broadly, for humanity. This disdain can be seen as a sophisticated mask hiding emotions like hatred, revealing a complex relationship to joy and social connection.
In practice
In a discussion about social attitudes, this quote can highlight the dangers of dismissing others' happiness.
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.
Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered. Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.
Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.
Aggression only moves in one direction - it creates more aggression.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
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