The Conquest of Happiness

by Bertrand Russell

don’t overestimate your own merits.

don’t expect others to take as much interest in you a...

don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any de...

A person born, let us say, in some small country town finds himself from early youth surrounded by hostility to everything that is necessary for mental excellence.

For all these reasons to most young men and young women of exceptional merit adolescence is a time of great unhappiness.

I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much respect paid to the opinions of others, both in great matters and in small ones.

The best way to increase toleration is to multiply the number of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow men.

may be said that it is impossible to feel friendly to things. Nevertheless there is something analogous to friendliness in the kind of interest that a geologist takes in rocks or an archaeologist in ruins, and this interest ought to be an element in our attitude to individuals or societies.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

what seems to me the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely, zest.

If you are walking over a chasm on a narrow plank, you are much more likely to fall if you feel fear than if you do not.

To many men home is a refuge from the truth: it is their fears and their timidities that make them enjoy a companionship in which these feelings are put to rest.

They seek from their wives what they obtained formerly from an unwise mother, and yet they are surprised if their wives regard them as grown-up children.

for on the whole women tend to love men for their character while men tend to love women for their appearance.

In this respect, it must be said, men show themselves the inferiors of women, for the qualities that men find pleasing in women are on the whole less desirable than those that women find pleasing in men.

Affection in the sense of a genuine reciprocal interest of two persons in each other, not solely as means to each other’s good but rather as a combination having a common good, is one of the most important elements of real happiness, and the man whose ego is so enclosed within steel walls that this enlargement of it is impossible misses the best that life has to offer, however successful he may be in his career.

A too powerful ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the world to the full.

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

The adult who wishes to have a happy relation with his own children or to provide a happy life for them must reflect deeply upon parenthood, and having reflected, must act wisely.

Since parents have lost their economic power over their daughters, they have become much more chary of expressing moral disapproval of them; there is not much use in scolding a person who won’t stay to be scolded.

Grief is unavoidable and must be expected, but everything that can be done should be done to minimize it. It is mere sentimentality to aim, as some do, at extracting the very uttermost drop of misery from misfortune.

For in a world so full of avoidable and unavoidable misfortunes, of illness and psychological tangles, of struggle and poverty and ill will, the man or woman who is to be happy must find ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness by which each individual is assailed. In some rare cases no great effort may be required.

The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires.

There is no limit to what can be done in the way of finding consolation from minor misfortunes by means of bizarre analogies and quaint parallels.

Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round in a warm garment of myth. But the thorns tear the warm garment and the cold blasts penetrate through the rents, and the man who has become accustomed to its warmth suffers far more from these blasts than a man who has hardened himself to them from the first.

The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affections to many others.