Bertrand Russell Quotes on Happiness (17 Quotes)

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

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

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

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence.

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

Drunkeness is temporary suicide the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.

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

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

If a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feelings. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat what he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois.

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

At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart they will know nothing of love and friendship.

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.

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.

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