External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way. Self-absorption is of various kinds. We may take the sinners, the narcissist, and the megalomaniac as three very common types. (p. 25)
I believe this unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistakenhabits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends. (p. 24)
The cure lies not in lamentation and nostalgia for the past, but in a more courageous acceptance of the modern outlook and a determination to root out nominally discarded superstitions from all their obscure hiding places. (p. 42)
He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. (p. 34)
Too little (excitement) may produce morbid cravings; too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young. (p. 62)
Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life, the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which theysuffer is due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear ofboredom. A happy lifemust be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in ananatmosphere of quiet that true joy can live. (p. 66)
Unnecessary modesty has a great deal to do with envy. (p. 85)
Envy therefore, evil as it is and terrible as are its effects, is not wholly of the devil. It is in part the expression of a heroic pain, the pain of those who walk through the night; blindly, perhaps to a better resting place, perhaps only to death and destruc-tion. To find the right road out of this despair, civilized man must enlarge his heart as he has enlarged his mind. He must learn to transcend self, and in so doing to acquire the freedom of the Universe. (p. 89)
therefore a more deliberate realization of the dangers of uniformity has become desirable. (p. 125)
To bear misfortunewell when it comes, it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of interests, so that the mind may find prepared for it some undisturbed place suggesting other associations and other emotions than those which are making the present difficult to bear. (p. 206)
It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident. For all these reasons the man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon whichhis life is built. (p. 206)
The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests. To be the recipientof affection is a potent cause of happiness. (p. 219)
Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love, but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest ofthe world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears fás soon as we have any genuine interest in per-sons or things outside ourselves. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration. (p. 222)
The happy man is the man who does not suffer from either of these failures of unity, whose personality isneither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because hefeels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found. (p. 223)
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