“To live is to be happy to live.”
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life — ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Henri Barbusse197
French novelist 1873–1935Related quotes
“Live, and be happy, and make others so.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Justine Moritz in Ch. 8
Frankenstein (1818)
“Live so that happiness is your priority.”
Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer
Original: (it) Vivi in modo che la felicità sia la tua priorità.
Source: prevale.net
“Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more”
Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.
“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.”
Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary
“I can be forced to live without happiness,
But I will never consent to live without honor.”
Pierre Corneille book Le Cid
L’on peut me réduire à vivre sans bonheur,
Mais non pas me résoudre à vivre sans honneur.
Don Gomès, act II, scene i.
Le Cid (1636)
“Happiness is not a goal… it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
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.
“To live among friends is the primary essential of happiness.”
William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer
Lord Kelvin’s Replies to Addresses given on the Celebration of the Jubilee of his Professorship (June 15-17, 1896). Quoted in Lord Kelvin, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow 1846-1899 (1899) by George F. Fitzgerald http://historical.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cul.math/docviewer?did=03620002
“I am looking for the happiness which lives.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
Light (1919), Ch. VII - A Summary
Context: I am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a thrill of joy tears through me.
“You need to be happy to live, I don’t.”
Keanu Reeves (1964) Canadian actor, director, producer and musician