How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
Page: 23

phrase is one of those phrases with which everyone is familiar, of which
everyone acknowledges the value, and which only the most sagacious put
into practice. I don't know why. I am entirely convinced that what is more
than anything else lacking in the life of the average well-intentioned man
of to-day is the reflective mood.

We do not reflect. I mean that we do not reflect upon genuinely important
things; upon the problem of our happiness, upon the main direction in which
we are going, upon what life is giving to us, upon the share which reason has
(or has not) in determining our actions, and upon the relation between our
principles and our conduct.

And yet you are in search of happiness, are you not? Have you discovered it?

The chances are that you have not. The chances are that you have already
come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it.
And they have attained it by realising that happiness does not spring from
the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of
reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

I suppose that you will not have the audacity to deny this. And if you admit
it, and still devote no part of your day to the deliberate consideration of your
reason, principles, and conduct, you admit also that while striving for a
certain thing you are regularly leaving undone the one act which is necessary
to the attainment of that thing.

Now, shall I blush, or will you?

Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your attention. I care
not (in this place) what your principles are. Your principles may induce you to
believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don't mind. All I urge is that a life
in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life; and
that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily
examination, reflection, and resolution. What leads to the permanent sorrow-
fulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they
genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would