激情晨读英语美文 第一章 人生如诗:我的家庭信条

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The Road to Happiness
By Bertrand Russell
If you look around at the men and women
whom you can call happy, you will see that
they all have certain things in common.
The most important of these things is an activity
which at most gradually builds up something that
you are glad to see coming into existence.
Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children
can get this kind of satisfaction out of
bringing up a family. Artists and authors
and men of science get happiness in this way
if their own work seems good to them. But there are
many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.
Many men who spend their working life in the city
devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated
toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes,
they experience all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion,
been treated too solemnly. It had been thought that
man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion.
Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory
may need a better theory to help them to recovery,
just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.
But when things are normal a man should be healthy
without a tonic and happy without a theory.
It is the simple things that really matter.
If a man delights in his wife and children,
has success in work, and finds pleasure in
the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn,
he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If,
on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his
children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare;
if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs
for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy
but a new regimen — a different diet, or more exercise,
or what not.Man is an animal, and his happiness
depends on his physiology more than he likes to think.
This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself
disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,
would increase their happiness more by walking six miles
every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.