Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the core driving forces of Bertrand Russell's life: love, knowledge, and compassion for others.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell highlights the three fundamental passions that have shaped his existence. He emphasizes the significance of love and knowledge as essential pursuits that provide meaning, while also expressing a deep empathy for the suffering experienced by humanity. This combination of personal longing and moral concern paints a picture of a life dedicated to both personal fulfillment and altruistic values.
In practice
This quote can inspire discussions about life choices during a philosophy class.
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.
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all men are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all men and all countries β not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of mankind as civilized.
Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.
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