“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation”
1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Context: The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.
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George Bernard Shaw413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer
Source: Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction
“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher
Anatole France book The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Les hommes qui se sont occupés du bonheur des peuples ont rendu leurs proches bien malheureux.
Pt. II, ch. 4
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive
In an interview https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-the-importance-of-personal-fit/ with Benjamin Todd, January 2014
James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author
As quoted in in Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920 (1922) by Carl Clinton Van Doren
Context: I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.
Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh
That Sort of Bear.
Source: The Tao of Pooh (1982)