Tag: bertrand russell

Bertrand Russell’s 4 rules for avoiding persecution mania

For Bertrand Russell — mathematician, writer, philosopher — persecution mania is two things: a belief that everyone is out to GET you, or a belief that everything that happens is ABOUT you. At a cafe, the woman on the phone who glances your way is gossiping about your outfit; a truck that cuts you off in traffic doesn’t like your driving style; and on it goes…

He believes persecution mania is a cause of insanity and a barrier to happiness, and offers four rules for prevention and relief (hah, I sound like a pharmaceutical commercial):

Number 1: your motives are not as altruistic as you think

Number 2: don’t overestimate your own merits

Number 3: don’t expect others to be as interested in you as you are in yourself

Number 4: don’t assume people care enough about you to want to harm you

Wise words from a book with many more: The Conquest of Happiness. Btw, I’m rewriting it — with the occasional adjustment — in a more casual, simple voice…I’ll share when it’s done!

Bertrand Russell on the career treadmill

It’s a shame this book The Conquest of Happiness isn’t more popular. When I finish, I plan to re-read a few pages a day, like I did with Daily Rituals. Keeps it fresh.

Here’s the PDF and other versions.

Here’s Russell in his chapter on competition:

“It is very singular how little men seem to realize that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up to a higher level. I am thinking, of course, of men in higher walks of business, men who already have a good income and could, if they chose, live on what they have. To do so would seem to them shameful, like deserting from the army in the face of the enemy, though if you ask them what public cause they are serving by their work, they will be at a loss to reply as soon as they have run through the platitudes to be found in the advertisements of the strenuous life.”

Quotes: Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here are 10 recent good ones:

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile. — Bertrand Russell

Currently reading Russell’s Conquest of Happiness. Highly recommended.

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. — Ecclesiastes

If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. — Scott Adams

Scott Adams’s new book How To Fail At Almost Everything is also great.

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
–Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

…a great poem.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. — John Cage

…if only this were easier to internalize.

It’s been a tough day. No sense making it worse with a salad. — quote from some movie

Yup, salads suck.

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met. — Yoshida Kenko from Essays in Idleness

Recently finished the above book, will have notes soon.

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wish I remembered the books…at least better than the meals.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. — Nietzsche

And a bonus…

True love is the soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another. I read that on a bumper sticker. — Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers

Here are a shit-ton of quotes.