Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Interpretation
Unhappiness can lead to a sense of pride in one's suffering, similar to how those who struggle with sleep may boast about it.
Bertrand Russell suggests that unhappy individuals often take pride in their condition, much like those who experience insomnia might view their sleeplessness as a badge of honor. This highlights a human tendency to create an identity around discomfort, implying that acknowledging and accepting one's unhappiness can sometimes come with a sense of pride rather than a desire for change.
In practice
During a motivational talk about overcoming adversity, you might quote Russell to emphasize how pride can sometimes hinder our ability to seek help.
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.
So much universe, and so little time.
All big things are made up of trifles. My entire life has been built on trifles.
But the most horrible spot .... lies....immediately south west of Oxford Road and is known as Little Ireland. The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench....must surely have reached the lowest stage of humanity.
Sometimes a disappearance can be more haunting than an apparition.
An hour's history of two minds is well told in a game of chess.
I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.
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