Bertrand Russell Pine Quotations

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

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

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.

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.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

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.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

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 satisfaction to be derived from success in a great constructive enterprise is one of the most massive that life has to offer.

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

Envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

True happiness for human beings is possible only to those who develop their godlike potentialities to the utmost.

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.