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 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
The satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.

Bertrand Russell
To write tragedy, a man must feel tragedy. To feel tragedy, a man must be aware of the world in which he lives. Not only with his mind, but with his blood and sinews.

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

Bertrand Russell
Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

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

Bertrand Russell
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be almost all friendships would be dissolved; the second effect, however, might be excellent, for a world without any friends would be felt to be intolerable, and we should learn to like each other without needing a veil of illusion to conceal from ourselves that we did not think each other absolutely perfect.

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
The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.

Bertrand Russell
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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
The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.

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

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 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
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.

Bertrand Russell
Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable.

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

Bertrand Russell
Very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possession of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travels or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.

Bertrand Russell
To be out of harmony with one's surroundings is of course a misfortune, but it is not always a misfortune to be avoided at all costs. Where the environment is stupid or prejudiced or cruel, it is a sign of merit to be out of harmony with it.

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

Bertrand Russell
The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.

Bertrand Russell
Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.

Bertrand Russell
The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security.

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
The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.

Bertrand Russell
From the height of their disillusionment they look down upon those whom they despise as simple souls. For my part I have no sympathy with this outlook. All disenchantment is to me a malady, which, it is true, certain circumstances may render inevitable, but which none the less, when it occurs, is to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded as a higher form of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell
Half the useful work in the world consists of combating the harmful work.

Bertrand Russell