Bertrand Russell - Happiness Quotes

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I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.

Bertrand Russell
Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.

Bertrand Russell
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Bertrand Russell
More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional [religious] beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. That is why it is important to show that no supernatural reasons are needed to make [people] kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.

Bertrand Russell
A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

Bertrand Russell
The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.

Bertrand Russell
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Bertrand Russell
Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

Bertrand Russell
I believe four ingredients are necessary for happiness: health, warm personal relations, sufficient means to keep you from want, and successful work.

Bertrand Russell
Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.

Bertrand Russell
To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

Bertrand Russell
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

Bertrand Russell
I think people who are unhappy are always proud of being so, and therefore do not like to be told that there is nothing grand about their unhappiness. A man who is melancholy because lack of exercise has upset his liver always believes that it is the loss of God, or the menace of Bolshevism, or some such dignified cause that makes him sad. When you tell people that happiness is a simple matter, they get annoyed with you.

Bertrand Russell