Bertrand Russell - The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

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To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Bertrand Russell
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Bertrand Russell
The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.

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

Bertrand Russell
In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.

Bertrand Russell
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Bertrand Russell
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Bertrand Russell
I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon sum rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity-the greatest intensity of which I am capable-for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak (to my subconscious mind) that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done.

Bertrand Russell
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West, results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.

Bertrand Russell
The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

Bertrand Russell
A great many worries can be diminished by realizing the unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.

Bertrand Russell
He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains.

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

Bertrand Russell
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Bertrand Russell
A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Bertrand Russell
Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.

Bertrand Russell
The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

Bertrand Russell
No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once and for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.

Bertrand Russell
To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Bertrand Russell
Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.

Bertrand Russell
Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men that comes chiefly through their work.

Bertrand Russell
A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

Bertrand Russell
The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless.

Bertrand Russell
What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

Bertrand Russell
One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

Bertrand Russell