The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.
Interpretation
Emotional responses are often less intense when we have a strong understanding of the facts.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that our emotional reactions to events or situations diminish in intensity as our understanding of the underlying facts increases. This reflects the idea that knowledge and rational thinking can temper our emotional responses, leading to a more balanced and thoughtful perspective on life.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about emotional intelligence education.
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.
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
The goal is to be the observer of your thoughts and not let your thoughts control you.
Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get.
You shouldn't expect people in the past to do things they couldn't have done.
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
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