The Conquest of Happiness - Bertrand Russell

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 is a titan of Western philosphy. He laid the foundation for modern mathematics, symbolic logic, and computing—not to mention contributing to a huge number of other problems in 20th-century philosophy.

But most of his work is about the power and limitations of symbolic systems—not exactly that practical for the everyday Joe!

So I was delighted to learn that a renowned thinker such as Russell had turned his attention toward a more popular subject: happiness.

Interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping of a diary, to getting psychoanalyzed, or perhaps to becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one. External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.