To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Interpretation
True happiness often comes from appreciating what you have rather than just focusing on what you desire.
Bertrand Russell's quote suggests that longing for certain desires can lead to discontent, but learning to find joy in what you already possess is essential for achieving true happiness. It emphasizes the importance of acceptance and gratitude in our lives, indicating that a sense of fulfillment can be found even when we lack certain things we wish for.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about finding joy in the present moment.
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.
Don't you stay at home of evenings? Don't you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.
Joy, feeling one's own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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