One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the fundamental human desire for admiration and respect from others.
Bertrand Russell's quote emphasizes that one of the strongest human emotions is the need for recognition and esteem from others. This desire can influence our actions and choices, shaping our interpersonal relationships and self-worth. It suggests that admiration and respect are not just superficial concerns, but deeply rooted passions that drive human behavior.
In practice
In a speech about self-esteem, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of respect in our lives.
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.
Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.
Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, βI wonβt be a mother anymore.β The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)
Neither can live while the other survives, and one of us is about to leave for good.
They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly. It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals. It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened.
You have a specific and important mission, that of keeping alive the relationship between the faith and the cultures of the peoples to whom you belong. . . . [W]e have to follow Christ along the concrete path of our daily lives so that he can transform us.
I've always been Sarah. My gender identity has always existed. I've always been a woman. Gay people aren't straight before they come out as gay, and transgender people are who they are before they come out and transition.
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