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Happy life – Bertrand Russell

“Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth our life is part of the life of the Earth; and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.

I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling and drink as a good examples, have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can truly be called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.

The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy that made the two-year- old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old could only find utterance in inarticulate cries.

Or, again, consider the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not. The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.“

— Bertrand Russell

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Voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny – Bertrand Russell

“One should as a rule, respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Opinion – Bertrand Russell

“If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry … (you have) no good reason for thinking as you do.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Thought – Bertrand Russell

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Important – Bertrand Russell

“The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.”

– Bertrand Russell

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The good life – Bertrand Russell

“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

– Bertrand Russell

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We know too much – Bertrand Russell

“We know too much and feel too little.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Creative impulses – Bertrand Russell

“The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Eccentric – Bertrand Russell

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Three parts dead – Bertrand Russell

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Fear thought – Bertrand Russell

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Beliefs – Bertrand Russell

“Our beliefs are, however, often contrary to fact.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Question mark – Bertrand Russell

“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Save the world – Bertrand Russell

“To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.”

– Bertrand Russell

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Experts agree – Bertrand Russell

“Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.”

– Bertrand Russell