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“Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment; that is, for the great majority of mankind."

Autobiography, Ch 5, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#link2H_NOTE https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/mill/auto/auto.c05.html source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 5: A Crisis in My Mental History (p. 100)

Happiness

“It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/184/mode/1up p. 184

Friendship , Hope , Parting

“France has done more for even English history than England has.”

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill. Michelet.On the writing of English history. Complete Works Vol 20. Page 221.http://files.libertyfund.org/pll/pdf/Mill_0223-20_EBk_v7.0.pdf

History

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or thing, having an independent existence of its own; and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of sense. The meaning of all general, and especially of all abstract terms, became in this way enveloped in a mystical base…”

John Stuart Mill

Note to Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind http://books.google.com/books?id=GxIuAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=james+mill&ei=jsFoR7yAOYfQiwHEzdVv&ie=ISO-8859-1#PPA5,M1 (1829) by James Mill, edited with additional notes by John Stuart Mill (1869)

Men , Way , Imagination , Sense

“The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay; and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing, in modern education, tends so much, when properly used, to form exact thinkers, who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions, and are not imposed on by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/19/mode/1up p. 19

Education , Exercises , Study , Mathematics

“experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/141/mode/1up pp. 141-142

Time , Life

“In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/38/mode/1up p. 38

Education

“[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, “Who made me?” cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, “Who made God?””

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 2: Moral Influences in Early Youth. My Father's Character and Opinions.

God , World , Question

“It is evident that this, among many other of the purposes of my father's scheme of education, could not have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept me from having any great amount of intercourse with other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping not only the ordinary corrupting influence which boys exercise over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling; and for this he was willing that I should pay the price of inferiority in the accomplishments which schoolboys in all countries chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education were principally in the things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves, and from being brought together in large numbers.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/35/mode/1up p. 35

Education , Exercises , Learning , Country

“It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education (pp. 13-14)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/19/mode/1up pp. 19-20

Education , Study

“If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Love , Confidence

“The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. 1: Introductory

World , Freedom

“Capacity for [higher] nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but my mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Life , Men , Hostility , Pleasure

“When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's "Mémoires," and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them-would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my been grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/140/mode/1up pp. 140-141

Boy , Reading , Happiness , Dead

“this third period (as it may be termed) of my mental progress, which now went hand in hand with hers, my opinions gained equally in breadth and depth, I understood more things, and those which I had understood before, I now understood more thoroughly. I had now completely turned back from what there had been of excess in my reaction against Benthamism. I had, at the height of that reaction, certainly become much more indulgent to the common opinions of society and the world, and more willing to be content with seconding the superficial improvement which had begun to take place in those common opinions, than became one whose convictions on so many points, differed fundamentally from them. I was much more inclined, than I can now approve, to put in abeyance the more decidedly heretical part of my opinions, which I now look upon as almost the only ones, the assertion of which tends in any way to regenerate society.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/230/mode/1up p. 230

World , Parting , Way

“the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/10/mode/1up p. 10

Nature , Reading , Universe , Time

“Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again was as miserable as I had been.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life

“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being

Men , God

“Nothing contributes more to nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free character of their habitations.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/55/mode/1up p. 55

People

“Their worship was not paid to the demon which such a being as they imagined would really be, but to their own idea of excellence. The evil is, that such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the most obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from every train of ideas which would lead the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence, because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature, and with much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian creed.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/42/mode/1up p. 42

Imagination , Nature , Evil , Training