The Conquest of Happiness
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Read between July 29 - August 2, 2024
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“Do numbers exist, and if so, what are they?” or “Is time an illusion?”;
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Bertrand Russell, who died in Wales in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven, is the best example ever of a philosopher who not only lived up to both stereotypes but enlarged the difference between them.
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A good way to read this book is to consider it a temporal telescope that allows us to see how far we’ve come.
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The causes of these various kinds of unhappiness lie partly in the social system, partly in individual psychology—which, of course, is itself to a considerable extent a product of the social system.
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what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?
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Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
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The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead.
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“Ours is a lost cause and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We should rather die as men than live as animals.
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the making of new books is certainly vanity.
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Love is to be valued in the first instance
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as in itself a source of delight.
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And not only is love a source of delight, but its absence is a source of pain.
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love is to be valued because it enhances all the best pleasures, such as music, and sunrise in mountains, and the sea under the full moon.
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man who has never enjoyed beautiful things in the company of a woman whom he love...
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the full the magic power of which such thin...
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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.
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What people mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.
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There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
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The emphasis upon competition in modern life is connected with a general decay of civilized standards such as must have occurred in Rome after the Augustan age.
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It is not only work that is poisoned by the philosophy of competition; leisure is poisoned just as much. The kind of leisure which is quiet and restoring to the nerves comes to be felt boring.
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The cure for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life.
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Animals in captivity, it is true, become listless, pace up and down, and yawn, but in a state of nature I do not believe that they experience anything analogous to boredom. Most of the time they are on the lookout for enemies, or food, or both; sometimes they are mating, sometimes they are trying to keep warm.
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There are two sorts, of which one is fructifying, while the other is stultifying.
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There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty.
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In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this.
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When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not.
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A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
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It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times. When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available, give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
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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.
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When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. Having looked this possible misfortune in the face, give yourself sound reasons for thinking that after all it would be no such very terrible disaster.
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Such reasons always exist, since at the worst nothing that happens to oneself has any cosmic importance. When you have looked for some time steadily at the worst possibility and have said to yourself with real conviction, “Well, after all, that would not matter so very much,” you will find that your worry diminishes to a quite extraordinary extent. It may be necessary to repeat the process a few times, but in the end, if you have shirked nothing in facing the worst possible issue, you will find that your worry disappears altogether and is replaced by a kind of exhilaration.
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Now every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.
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the proper course with every kind of fear is to think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar.
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The love of scandal is an expression of this general malevolence; any story against another woman is instantly believed, even on the flimsiest evidence.
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Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy.
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envy is immensely promoted by misfortunes in childhood.
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The child who finds a brother or sister preferred before himself acquires the habit of envy, and when he goes out into the world looks for injustices of which he is the victim, perceives them at once if they occur, and imagines them if they do not.
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Another misfortune in childhood which has the same result is to have parents without much parental feeling.
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Without having an unduly favored brother or sister, a child may perceive that the children in other families are more loved by their mother and father than he
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Merely to realize the causes of one’s own envious feelings is to take a long step towards curing them.
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You cannot therefore get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are.
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The essentials of human happiness are simple, so simple that sophisticated people cannot bring themselves to admit what it is they really lack.
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“conscience”
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the simplest of these is the fear of being found out.
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Such men can forget their crime when there seems little chance of detection, but when they are found out or in grave danger of being so, they wish they had been more virtuous, and this wish may give them a lively sense of the enormity of their sin.
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Now very large parts of this infantile moral teaching are devoid of all rational foundation and such as cannot be applied to the ordinary behavior of ordinary men.
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Whenever you begin to feel remorse for an act which your reason tells you is not wicked, examine the causes of your feeling of remorse, and convince yourself in detail of their absurdity. Let
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I am not suggesting that a man should be destitute of morality, I am only suggesting that he should be destitute of superstitious morality, which is a very different thing.
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This, like many other forms of insanity, is only an exaggeration of a tendency not at all uncommon among people who count as normal.
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remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself.
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