The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that imagining and pursuing our desires can be easier and more advantageous than hard work.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the concept that envisioning what we want and striving to achieve it can offer significant advantages, often paralleling the ease that comes with dishonest means, like theft, compared to the rigor of honest work. This statement can provoke reflections on the ethics of desire and ambition, prompting us to consider what it means to pursue our goals in ways that may not align with conventional standards of integrity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the power of vision and ambition.
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.
Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
If the Devil can only make you think that you are abused or ill treated, and you begin to fret about it, and you give the Devil power over you - in the end, it is as bad as though you had done wrong yourself.
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.