Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Interpretation
Happiness requires not just enjoyment but also hope, initiative, and the willingness to embrace change.
In this quote, Bertrand Russell emphasizes that true happiness in life extends beyond mere pleasures or material enjoyments. Instead, it encompasses the essential components of hope for the future, the enterprise or courage to pursue goals, and the ability to adapt and embrace change. These elements combined create a more profound and enduring sense of fulfillment and joy in an individual's life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth, you could say, 'Remember, happiness comes from hope and the courage to change.'
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.
We start to realize that there are anodynes in life that help us through the day. I don't care if it's a walk in the park, a look out the window, a good bubble bath - whatever. Even a meal you like, or a friend you want to call. That helps us solve all this stuff in our head.
The rights essential to happiness. . . . We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings and Lord of all the earth.
To know nothing is the happiest life.
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.
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