
“Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.”
Source: Ex Machina, Vol. 10: Term Limits
History of King Henry VII, III (1622)
“Happy endings are bullshit. There are only happy pauses.”
Source: Ex Machina, Vol. 10: Term Limits
“Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
Commonly attributed, but source unknown. note: Uncertain
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 43
Context: Liberate yourself from concepts and see the truth with your own eyes. — It exists HERE and NOW; it requires only one thing to see it: openness, freedom — the freedom to be open and not tethered by any ideas, concepts, etc. … When our mind is tranquil, there will be an occasional pause to its feverish activities, there will be a let-go, and it is only then in the interval between two thoughts that a flash of UNDERSTANDING — understanding, which is not thought — can take place.
Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 19–24.
The Preface
Fruits of Solitude (1682)
If This Is a Man (1947)
Context: Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.
"Irish Essays. A Speech at Eton" (1882)