Bertrand Russell, third Earl of Russell, was born in Wales on May 18, 1872. An unhappy child belonging to the nobility, he lost his parents when he was only three years old and raised by his strict paternal grandparents, he took refuge in mathematics, without which according to confessed, he would have committed suicide. An academic at Harvard, Cambridge and Berkeley, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, the philosopher defined himself with these words: 'I have successively imagined myself as a liberal, a socialist or a pacifist. I have never been, however, any of these things. Always the skeptical intellect has whispered doubts to me.'
Brilliant and restless mind, he made his life a crusade in pursuit of happiness.
Thus, in 1930, he would publish the work that concerns us, To the conquest of happiness.
"I have written this book based on the conviction that many people who are unhappy could become happy if they make a well-directed effort," he would point out in his foreword.
The work is a clear and entertaining analysis of the reasons that make us unhappy and those that, on the contrary, make us happy. Thus, as a manual, it appears divided into two parts: in the first, Russell focuses on the causes of unhappiness, and in the second, he focuses on the causes of happiness.
And each one of them is divided in turn into small chapters in which it deals with the various aspects of each state.
In unhappiness he speaks of competition -or competitiveness-, boredom and excitement, fatigue, envy, feeling of sin, persecution mania -or victimhood- and fear of public opinion.
While in the part corresponding to happiness, it focuses on enthusiasm, affection, family, work, non-personal interests, effort and resignation.
We reproduce 20 of his maxims in pursuit of achieving it:
1. 'The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your relations to the things and people you care about be, as far as possible, friendly and not hostile.'
2. 'Among all forms of caution, caution in love is possibly the most lethal to true happiness.'
3. 'Never try to discourage the idea that you will succeed.'
4. 'When you meet opposition, even if it is from your wife or your children, try to overcome it with arguments and not by authority, the victory that depends on authority is unreal and illusory.'
5 . 'Have no respect for the authority of others, because there are always opposing authorities to be found'.
6.' Do not use power to suppress opinions that you think are harmful, for if you do, the opinions will suppress you.'
7. 'Happiness that requires intoxication, of whatever kind, is spurious and unsatisfying. Genuinely satisfying happiness is accompanied by the full exercise of our faculties and the full understanding of the world in which we live'.
8. 'Seek more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, since, if you value intelligence properly, the former implies deeper agreement than the latter.'
9. 'Be scrupulously truthful, even when the truth is uncomfortable, because it is more uncomfortable to try to hide it.'
10. 'Do not be envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool believes that this is happiness.'
11. 'A symptom of approaching a nervous breakdown is believing that your work is tremendously important.'
12. 'Men are not happy in a prison, and the passions locked up within ourselves constitute the worst of prisons.
13. 'The happy man is the one who lives objectively, the one who is free in his affections and has wide interests, the one who secures his happiness through these interests and affections which, in turn, make him the object of interest and affection of many others'.
14. 'Lacking some of the things one desires is an indispensable condition for happiness'.
15. 'Do not be afraid to be eccentric in your opinions, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.'
16. 'Don't think it's worth proceeding by concealing evidence, the evidence will surely come to light.'
17. 'Lacking some of the things one desires is an indispensable condition for happiness'.
18. 'Happiness has to be a conquest, and not a gift from the gods'.
19. 'A happy life has to be, to a large extent, a quiet life, because only in a quiet environment can you live true joy'.
20. 'Whoever wishes to increase human happiness should try to increase admiration and reduce envy'.
We trust that after reading them and putting them into practice they will be happier.
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