The Road to Happiness通往幸福的道路

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.

只要你觀察一下周圍那些你可稱之為幸福的男男女女，就會看出他們都有某些共同之處。在這些共同之處中有一點是最重要的：那就是活動本身，它在大多數情況下本身就很有趣，而且可逐漸的使你的愿望得以實現。生性喜愛孩子的婦女，能夠從撫養子女中得到這種滿足。藝術家、作家和科學家如果對自己的工作感到滿意，也能以同樣的方式得到快樂。不過，還有很多是較低層次的快樂。許多在城里工作的人到了周末自愿地在自家的庭院里做無償的勞動，春天來時，他們就可盡情享受自己創造的美景帶來的快樂。

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.