I was not born happy. As a child, my favourite hymn was: ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin’. At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable. In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Conquest of Happiness, Part 1, ch. 1 “What Makes People Unhappy” (1930)
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Added on 5-Mar-25 | Last updated 5-Mar-25
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