To a modern mind, it is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a virtuous life if nothing is going to be achieved by it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the challenge of finding motivation in virtue when tangible achievements seem absent.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell addresses the modern mindset that often prizes achievement and success over moral or virtuous living. He suggests that in contemporary life, it can be challenging for individuals to feel truly passionate or enthusiastic about leading a virtuous life if they perceive that such a life lacks tangible rewards or accomplishments, highlighting the tension between ethical living and societal values focused on achievement.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about ethics in modern society.
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.
God has wisely kept us in the dark concerning future events and reserved for himself the knowledge of them, that he may train us up in a dependence upon himself and a continued readiness for every event.
I've been practising Buddhism for forty years, and that's what has led me to this path of discovering my own humanity and recognizing the humanity in others.
Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created the world in six days; rather the contrary is true. God created the world in six days because this number is perfect, and it would remain perfect, even if the work of the six days did not exist.
Be a good human being, a _x000D_ warmhearted, affectionate person. _x000D_ That is my fundamental belief.
What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!
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