Man can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
Interpretation
Hope and fear can motivate us, but they must be strong and relevant to keep us engaged.
This quote by Bertrand Russell highlights the dual forces of hope and fear in motivating human behavior. For motivation to be effective, these emotions need to be vivid and immediate, allowing individuals to harness them positively without becoming weary or overwhelmed. It suggests that our emotional responses can drive us towards actions, but they require clarity and urgency to be truly impactful.
In practice
In a motivational speech about achieving goals, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of having clear and immediate aspirations.
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.
Bring anger and pride under your feet, _x000D_ turn them into a ladder and climb higher.
We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.
I would like to see the day when somebody would be appointed surgeon somewhere who had no hands, for the operative part is the least part of the work.
When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.
If the price of peace were a lowering of your consciousness, and the price of stillness a lack of vitality and alertness, then they would not be worth having.
If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.
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