The Conquest of Happiness

by Bertrand Russell

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. Walt Whitman

what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?

At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.

Liberation from the tyranny of early beliefs and affections is the first step towards happiness for these victims of maternal "virtue".

When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love.

The typical unhappy man is one who, having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and has therefore given to his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon the achievement as opposed to the activities connected with it.