“Happiness is not a goal… it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
Variant: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 95
Context: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
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Eleanor Roosevelt 148
American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady… 1884–1962Related quotes
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.”
As quoted by Ernst Straus in Einstein: A Centenary Volume by A.P. French (1980), p. 32.
Attributed in posthumous publications
Variant: "if you want to be a happy man, you should tie your life to a goal, not to other people and not to things." A quote from Ernst Straus' memoir of Einstein in Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives edited by Gerald Holton and Yehuda Elkana (1982), p. 420 http://books.google.com/books?id=CNuwE3NL1QgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA420#v=onepage&q&f=false
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 95
"The Myths by Which We Live", in The Rotarian, Vol. 107, No. 3 (September 1965), p. 55
Variant: The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.
“Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.”
Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65.
Attributed to Emerson in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous on-line sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/29/purpose/ indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all."
Misattributed
“As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy
