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.
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.
I'm perfectly miserable; but if you consider me presentable, I die happy.
It's a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.
I'd like to think you don't stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don't. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.
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