Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
Interpretation
Indecision drains energy and yields no results.
This quote by Bertrand Russell emphasizes the mental and emotional toll that indecision takes on a person. It suggests that being stuck in a state of uncertainty not only exhausts us but also leads to a lack of progress, highlighting the importance of making choices and taking action in order to achieve meaningful outcomes.
In practice
During a motivational speech to encourage prompt decision-making.
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.
Expect much from yourself and little from others and you will avoid incurring resentments
The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.
We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
Jealous people poison their own banquet and then eat it
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