One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that overvaluing our work can lead to stress and mental strain.
Bertrand Russell's quote highlights the irony that as individuals grow increasingly anxious about the importance of their work, they may be closer to a breakdown. It reflects a deeper philosophical insight into the human condition, urging us to reconsider the significance we attach to our professions and tasks, suggesting that such beliefs can be detrimental to our mental health and well-being.
In practice
A motivational speech about balancing work and life.
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.
There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.
Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harrass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you - alas, it is true of almost every one of us!
Maybe I am naive, but I don't think talking about the Holocaust with total and complete cynicism is possible for Israeli politicians. It's inevitable that the Holocaust is part of Israeli politics.
In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.
When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous
They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?
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