The Conquest of Happiness

by Bertrand Russell

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

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.”

All serious success in work depends upon some genuine interest in the material with which the work is concerned.

its cure lies in the growth of self-respect.

Power kept within its proper bounds may add greatly to happiness, but as the sole end of life it leads to disaster, inwardly if not outwardly.

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.

There is no arguing with a mood; it can be changed by some fortunate event, or by a change in our bodily condition, but it cannot be changed by argument.

He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.

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.

What I do maintain is that success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.

no matter what a man’s profession may be, yet at the same time the kind of thing that is respected is not just success, but that excellence, whatever that may be, to which success has been due.

The trouble arises from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be accorded to the victor.

Competition considered as the main thing in life is too grim, too tenacious, too much a matter of taut muscles and intent will, to make a possible basis of life for more than one or two generations at most.

The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth.

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.

Most men and women are very deficient in control over their thoughts. I mean by this that they cannot cease to think about worrying topics at times when no action can be taken in regard to them.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

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.

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

Our doings are not so important as we naturally suppose; our successes and failures do not after all matter very much.

Even great sorrows can be survived; troubles which seem as if they must put an end to happiness for life, fade with the lapse of time until it becomes almost impossible to remember their poignancy.

The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.

When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen.

Now every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.

Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have.

Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy.

Merely to realize the causes of one’s own envious feelings is to take a long step towards curing them. The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is a fatal one.

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.

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.

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.

The time spent in producing harmony between the different parts of one’s personality is time usefully employed.

No man need fear that by making himself rational he will make his life dull. On the contrary, since rationality consists in the main of internal harmony, the man who achieves it is freer in his contemplation of the world and in the use of his energies to achieve external purposes than is the man who is perpetually hampered by inward conflicts.

The happiness that requires intoxication of no matter what sort is a spurious and unsatisfying kind. The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties, and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

We expect them to think that, unlike the rest of mankind, we have no faults. When we are compelled to admit that we have faults, we take this obvious fact far too seriously. Nobody should expect to be perfect, or be unduly troubled by the fact that he is not.

do you produce because you feel an urgent compulsion to express certain ideas or feelings, or are you actuated by the desire for applause?

To recognize that your merit is not so great as you had hoped may be more painful for a moment, but it is a pain which has an end, beyond which a happy life again becomes possible.

No person should be expected to distort the main lines of his life for the sake of another individual. On occasion there may exist such a strong affection that even the greatest sacrifices become natural, but if they are not natural they should not be made, and no person should be held blameworthy for not making them.

the comparatively sane victim of persecution mania sees in all kinds of actions a reference to himself which does not, in fact, exist.

No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it.

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

There is a comfortable doctrine that genius will always make its way, and on the strength of this doctrine many people consider that the persecution of youthful talent cannot do much harm.

It is difficult to achieve any kind of greatness while a fear of this kind remains strong, and it is impossible to acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for it is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

The man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure.

The pleasure of work is open to any one who can develop some specialized skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause. I

he will not be soured by ingratitude, since he will seldom suffer it and will not notice when he does.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

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.

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.