Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Interpretation
Intense desires often stem from profound suffering.
This quote by Bertrand Russell suggests that when individuals experience significant distress or hardship, it can lead to the development of heightened hopes or aspirations. In essence, extreme circumstances can cultivate a longing for improvement or change, as people seek solace or betterment from their painful experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, one might say, 'As Bertrand Russell once noted, extreme hopes are born from extreme misery, reminding us that our struggles can inspire our dreams.'
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.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
The holy child is waiting to be born in every instant, not just once a year.
Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.
I want [my daughter] to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.
We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?
Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride.
Some would find fault with the morning, if they ever got up early enough.. The fault find faults even in Paradise.
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