Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.
Interpretation
True happiness comes as a byproduct of pursuing other goals, rather than chasing happiness itself.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell suggests that happiness should not be the primary goal of an individual's life. Instead, happiness often arises as a result of engaging in meaningful pursuits, fulfilling relationships, or personal growth. When people focus solely on attaining happiness, it can elude them; however, when they invest their energy into passions and positive activities, happiness tends to follow naturally.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, someone might use this quote to emphasize the importance of pursuing passions.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.
Of these austerer virtues the love of truth is the chief, and in mathematics, more than elsewhere, the love of truth may find encouragement for waning faith. Every great study is not only an end in itself, but also a means of creating and sustaining a lofty habit of mind; and this purpose should be kept always in view throughout the teaching and learning of mathematics.
At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.
Moreover, the attitude that one ought to believe such and such a proposition, independently of the question whether there is evidence in its favor, is an attitude which produces hostility to evidence and causes us to close our minds to every fact that does not suit our prejudices.
Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.
Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
I was complaining that I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet.
The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
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