One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Interpretation
Certainty can be misleading, while creativity and understanding often lead to uncertainty and questioning.
Bertrand Russell highlights the paradox of knowledge in our era: those who possess unwavering certainty often lack intelligence and insight, while those endowed with imagination and understanding grapple with doubt and indecision. This statement suggests that true wisdom comes from questioning rather than a blind acceptance of certainty, emphasizing the value of critical thinking and the complexity of understanding the world.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of critical thinking, one might say, 'As Bertrand Russell pointed out, one of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid.'
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.
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
I suppose itβs comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.
I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.
However tight things are, you still need to have the big picture at the forefront of your mind.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.