The Conquest Of Happiness Quotes
"Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but they are not, at least in a great majority of cases."
"A mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe."
"The causes of these various kinds of unhappiness lie partly in the social system, partly in individual psychology."
"I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: 'Weary of earth and laden with my sin.'"
"Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects."
"What can a man or woman, here and now, in the midst of our nostalgic society, do to achieve happiness for himself or herself?"
"The wise man will be as happy as circumstances permit, and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a point, he will contemplate something else instead."
"For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."
"The struggle for life is a thing which does, of course, occur. It may occur to any of us if we are unfortunate."
"The source of this trouble is the prevalent philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition."
"A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life."
"Every great achievement is possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement."
"The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings."
"The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life."
"Next to worry probably one of the most potent causes of unhappiness is envy."
"There is, it is true, an idealistic theory according to which democracy is the best form of government."
"A lofty morality serves the same purpose; those who have a chance to sin against it are envied, and it is considered virtuous to punish them for their sins."
"The love of scandal is an expression of this general malevolence; any story against another woman is instantly believed, even on the flimsiest evidence."
"Exactly the same thing, however, is to be observed among men, except that women regard all other women as their competitors."
"Is it not sad that the incomparable genius of Mr. Newton should have become overclouded by the loss of reason?"
"Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy."
"Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have."
"To such questions envy finds no answer."
"Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and to diminish envy."
"The only cure for envy in the case of ordinary men and women is happiness."
"Merely to realize the causes of one’s own envious feelings is to take a long step towards curing them."
"The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is a fatal one."
"Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations."
"Unnecessary modesty has a great deal to do with envy."
"The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that some one else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on."
"You cannot therefore get away from envy by means of success alone, for there will always be in history or legend some person even more successful than you are."
"The rational man will regard his own undesirable acts, as he regards those of others, as acts produced by certain circumstances, and to be avoided either by a fuller realization that they are undesirable, or, where this is possible, by avoidance of the circumstances that caused them."
"The sense of sin is especially prominent at moments when the conscious will is weakened by fatigue, by illness, by drink, or by any other cause."
"It is absurd to suppose that moments of weakness give more insight than moments of strength."
"The ideally virtuous man, if we had got rid of asceticism, would be the man who permits the enjoyment of all good things whenever there is no evil consequence to outweigh the enjoyment."
"The greatest happiness comes with the most complete possession of one’s faculties."
"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."
"In this chapter I propose to deal with what seems to me the most universal and distinctive mark of happy men, namely, zest."
"To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level."
"It is good to have as true a picture of the world as is compatible with necessary activities."
"Each of us is in the world for no very long time, and within the few years of his life has to acquire whatever he is to know of this strange planet and its place in the universe."
"A man who can forget his work when it is over and not remember it until it begins again the next day is likely to do his work far better than the man who worries about it throughout the intervening hours."
"Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life."
"The man who is bored with his meals corresponds to the victim of Byronic unhappiness."
"The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate."
"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."
"The man who enjoys watching football is to that extent superior to the man who does not."
"Genuine zest, not the sort that is really a search for oblivion, is part of the natural make-up of human beings except in so far as it has been destroyed by unfortunate circumstances."
"Even in the most fortunate lives there are times when things go wrong."
"A capacity to become interested in something outside the cause of anxiety is an immense boon."
"To bear misfortune well when it comes, it is wise to have cultivated in happier times a certain width of interests."
"The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests."
"To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality."
"All our affections are at the mercy of death, which may strike down those whom we love at any moment."
"It is therefore necessary that our lives should not have that narrow intensity which puts the whole meaning and purpose of our life at the mercy of accident."
"Happiness is not, except in very rare cases, something that drops into the mouth, like a ripe fruit, by the mere operation of fortunate circumstances."
"In a world so full of avoidable and unavoidable misfortunes, the man or woman who is to be happy must find ways of coping with the multitudinous causes of unhappiness."
"Resignation, however, has also its part to play in the conquest of happiness, and it is a part no less essential than that played by effort."
"The wise man, though he will not sit down under preventable misfortunes, will not waste time and emotion upon such as are unavoidable."
"Work that is worth doing can be done even by those who do not deceive themselves either as to its importance or as to the ease with which it can be done."
"Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible."
"It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."
"The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life."