The Conquest of Happiness

by Bertrand Russell

To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need of our civilization; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. To

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

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.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature,

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.

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.

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.

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.

An expansive and generous attitude towards other people not only gives happiness to others, but is an immense source of happiness to its possessor, since it causes him to be generally liked.

The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t overestimate your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any desire to persecute you.

The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he

Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest.

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

It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.