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.
Interpretation
True freedom exists when individuals stop seeking temporary pleasures and possessions from life.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes that genuine freedom is achieved not through the accumulation of material possessions or the pursuit of temporal desires, which are often fleeting and subject to change. Instead, it suggests that freedom involves a detachment from the ever-changing aspects of life and an acceptance of life's inherent uncertainties, allowing individuals to find peace and liberation within themselves rather than in external factors.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the true meaning of independence.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing is more imminent than the impossible . . . what we must always foresee is the unforeseen.
I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Iβve said before, bugs in amber.
A strong nation is one that is loved by its people and, as Edmund Burke put it, for a country to be loved it ought to be lovely.
This upper limit, of earth at our feet is visible and touches the air, but below it reaches to infinity
While under precapitalistic conditions superior men were the masters on whom the masses of the inferior had to attend, under capitalism the more gifted and more able have no means to profit from their superiority other than to serve to the best of their abilities the wishes of the majority of the less gifted.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.