Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale
Interpretation
Life is short, and when viewed on a cosmic scale, humanity's existence is insignificant.
This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights the transient nature of human life and existence in the vastness of the universe. It urges us to reflect on our lives, suggesting that while our individual experiences may feel significant, they are merely fleeting moments in the larger context of time and the cosmos. Russell encourages us to consider our mortality and the brevity of mankind's presence in the universe, prompting a deeper contemplation on how we choose to live our lives.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of making the most of our time.
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.
I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?
Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.
Reason is our soul's left hand, Faith her right, By these we reach divinity
It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.
I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonderful. The simple truth was that life was both. p 214
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