If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat; what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.
Interpretation
True happiness in philosophy must stem from compassion, not from envy or resentment towards others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell critiques the motivations behind Marx's ideology, suggesting that a genuine philosophy aimed at happiness should be rooted in kindness and understanding rather than a desire for the suffering of others. He implies that Marx's focus on the proletariat's happiness was undermined by a disdain for the bourgeois, which detracted from the true essence of a philosophy that should promote universal well-being.
In practice
In a lecture discussing ethical philosophies, one might quote Russell to illustrate the importance of compassion in philosophical thought.
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.
Where there is no imagination there is no horror.
You can't control the fact that you are born a white man or born into wealth. When people say, 'Check your privilege,' they're saying, 'Acknowledge how these factors helped you move through life.' They're not saying apologize for it.
What we make of people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether our loyalties are to the past, the present or the future.
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one's belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one's right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
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