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。
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.
幸福其實很簡單
只要你觀察一下週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願望得以實現。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。許多在城裏工作的人到了週末自願地在自家的庭院裏做無償的勞動，春天來時，他們就可盡情享受自己創造的美景帶來的快樂。
在我看來，整個關於快樂的話題一向都被太嚴肅的對待過了。過去一直有這樣的看法：如果沒有一種生活的理論或者宗教信仰，人是不可能幸福的。也許那些由於理論不好才導致不快樂的人需要一種較好的理論幫助他們重新快活起來，就像你生過病需要吃補藥一樣。但是，正常情況下，一個人不吃補藥也應當是健康的；沒有理論也應當是幸福的。真正有關係的是一些簡單的事情。
文萃咖
