“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

—  Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson 727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

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“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.”

Leo Rosten (1908–1997) American writer

"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.

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Life's purpose is to be happy.
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This is what keeps us trying and going.
If we can't enjoy the simple things in life;
We are missing the meaning of life.
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Source: The End of Starvation : Creating an Idea Whose Time Has Come, Werner Erhard, 1977, 3 http://www.wernererhard.net/thpsource.html,
Source: Also published in — The end of starvation: creating an idea whose time has come, 3, 1982, Werner Erhard http://books.google.com/books?id=4o4wAAAAMAAJ&q=%22be+of+genuine+consequence+in+the+world%22&dq=%22be+of+genuine+consequence+in+the+world%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rpyFUvTMB6_MsQT0sYCwDQ&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ,
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Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

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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