The Conquest of Happiness

by Bertrand Russell

All come determined to be happy, with the kind of grim resolve with which one determines not to make a fuss at the dentist's.

All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.

I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was: "Weary of earth and laden with my sin." 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.

But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.

There is no ultimate satisfaction in the cultivation of one element of human nature at the expense of all the others, nor in viewing all the world as raw material for the magnificence of one's own ego.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous break-down is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.

You can get away from envy by enjoying the pleasures that come your way, by doing the work that you have to do, and by avoiding comparisons with those whom you imagine, perhaps quite falsely, to be more fortunate than yourself.