Stephen Fry commentary on Happiness.

I just watched a clip of an interview done with Stephen Fry on BBC Hour. I loved the message and wanted to share it. A little background on him:

Stephen Fry is an English actor and comedian and novelist. He is an homosexual man who has had great personal struggle in the past, with his sexuality, he handled it with his usual caustic wit when he quipped: "I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, 'That's the last time I'm going up one of those.' Part of my appreciation of Fry comes in knowing he survived a nervous breakdown in 95 and was diagnosed with a mental illness similar to mine....yet he plugs on being brutally honest about himself and using humor to DE-stigmatize and DE-mystify many aspects of mental health and identity including a documentary called Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic-Depressive.

The transcript:

The most destructive vice one can have, outside of pride, which is one of the cardinal sins, is self pity. I think that self pity is the most destructive emotion one can have. To borrow from Wilde's analysis of hatred, which I actually think hatred is a subset of self pity, not the other way around; it destroys everything around it, except itself. Self pity will destroy anything around it that is good, it will destroy relationships, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. Its so simple to think that one is hard done by and things are unfair and one is under appreciated, and if only one had a chance at this, or at that one could have done better. One would be happier if only "this" , one is unlucky etc. Some of them may be true, but to pity oneself is to do an enormous disservice, it's an appalling spectacle. If I were to publish a self help book, "How to be Happy; by Stephen Fry" it would guarantee success, it would be full of blank pages and on the first page it would say "STOP feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy"! That's it that's all you need.