Alain is the nom de plume of the French philosopher Émil Chartier who lived from 1868 until

1951. Alain was a high school (lycée) philosophy teacher in Paris for most of his life, at the
famous lycée Henri IV.

Among his students were Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Maurois and André Malraux.
Most of his students simply called him l'Homme, or "the man." He was, arguably, the most
influential philosopher in France during the first half of the twentieth century.

Alain wrote in a form that he called the "propos," which can be translated as a talk or
conversation. He began writing these propos as two-page articles for the newspaper Dépêche de
Rouen and later for his own journal, Libres Propos. He wrote more than five thousand of them or
an average of one every two and and a half days over a period of 33 years.

In 1928, 93 of these propos, which dealt with the general theme of happiness, were gathered into
one volume called Propos sur le Bonheur which has been translated for this book as, Alain on
Happiness.

Alain's style is lapidary and dense. He made it a practice never to modify or rewrite what he had
once written down. He said "The final barrier (the last of two blank pages) approached as other
ideas began to appear; they were repressed; but, and I don't know how, they succeeded in filling
out the principal idea... The result was a kind of poetry and strength." Since he wrote the essays
as articles that would appear the following day in the newspaper, there was no time to make
corrections.

He said, "The material crowds in, and it has to line up, and pass through, and be quick. That is
my acrobatic stunt, as well as I can describe it; I have succeeded perhaps one time in six, which
is a lot ..."

This concision of expression sometimes puts a considerable burden on the reader. It is often
necessary to meditate for several minutes and longer on paragraphs of a single essay before
they become clear. But the reward is great and it isn't too much to say that most readers will read
his books many times to distill their wisdom and practical, good sense.

Alain's philosophy is his own, of course, but he was deeply influenced by Plato, Descartes and
Spinoza. He said "We must start with Descartes and lead his beautiful doctrine all the way to
Spinoza. It is the method for not falling into scholasticism and for waking up the human being in
the reader."

To give a good idea of this highly recommend book, it is probably best to cite a few passages:

It should be noted that imagination cannot create anything; it is action that invents.

True politeness consists in feeling what one ought to feel.

Roman Rolland suggests that it is rare to find a happily married couple and that this is natural.

Thinking is a kind of game that is not always healthy. That is why the great Rousseau wrote: "the
man who meditates is a depraved animal."

Sometimes we read that men seek pleasure; but that is not at all apparent; it seems, rather, that
they seek hardships and that they like hardships.

For happiness is essentially poetry, and poetry means action; we can scarcely appreciate a
happiness that just comes our way; we want to have made it.

Fundamentally, the only thing we like is power. By the monsters that he sought out and
destroyed, Hercules proved his power in his own eyes. But as soon as he fell in love, he realized
that he was enslaved and understood the power of pleasure; all men are like that ; and that is
why pleasure makes them sad.

The police commissioner is, to my mind, the happiest of men. Why? Because he is always
engaged in action, always in new and unforeseen situations.

The sign of real progress in any activity is the pleasure derived from it. Thus one realizes that
work is the only pleasurable thing, and the only thing that really satisfies us.

It is hardship that is good, as Diogenes would say; the mind, however, does not easily accept this
paradox; it must work it out and, once again, the hardship involved in pondering it is what gives
pleasure.