The Conquest of Happiness

Bertrand Russell's 'The Conquest of Happiness' is a great book, and likely to be one of those ones I come back to again and again. First published in 1930, it provides some nice balance to some of the more modern books on the same subject that I have been reading. It also has less of the self-help motivational salesy feel of, for example, 'The monk who sold his ferrari'. Russell was a mathematician and a philosopher.

I first came across him in my first year maths class at university with Russell's Liar's paradox...

I always lie

In this book he looks at causes of unhappiness and causes of happiness:

• people who are unhappy and proud of it, competition, boredom, fatigue, envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania, fear of public opinion.

• Zest, affection, the family, work, impersonal interest, effort & resignation

There are lots of great 'quotable quotes', and a number of things to think about, so watch this space. One for now:

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.