“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

— Booker T. Washington

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Booker T. Washington 48

African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor 1856–1915

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“One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Letter to his mother, written from the University of Pennsylvania (12 February 1904), published in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957) edited by John C. Thirlwall, p. 5
General sources

“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Remarks at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (14 June 1956) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx; Box 895, Senate Speech Files, John F. Kennedy Papers, Pre-Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Pre-1960

“It is not possible to express the most precious insights,
To see all that craves to be seen,
To visit even the closest neighbors in the universe,
To learn all that needs to be learned,
To live without dying,
And I am sad about it.
But I lived
And I am happy about that.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Sadness and Happiness http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sadness-and-happiness-2/
From the poems written in English

“I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced that they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.”

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

“I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.”

J.B. Priestley I Have Been Here Before

I Have Been Here Before, Act III.

“That no matter what i did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

“One life is all we have, and we live it as we believe in living it, and then it's gone. But to surrender what you are, and live without belief - that's more terrible than dying - more terrible than dying young.”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

Quote is often seen as attributed to Joan of Arc. However, the quote is actually a line from a script for the 1946 Broadway play entitled Joan of Lorraine by Maxwell Anderson which later become a movie in 1948 entitled Joan of Arc directed by Victor Fleming and starring Ingrid Bergman. The line is spoken by Joan of Arc to Bishop Pierre Cauchon in Act II, Scene III of the play. ( Script http://books.google.com/books?id=bOe6kHHbSiEC)
Misattributed

“The more I reflect on the current world developments, the more I become convinced that the world needs perestroika no less than the Soviet Union needs it.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Nobel Address (1991)

“I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1952)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: I am more and more convinced that taking life over-seriously is a frivolous thing. There is an affected self-dramatizing in the brooding over one's prospects and destiny. The trifling attitude of an Ecclesiastes is essentially sober and serious. It is in closer touch with the so-called eternal truths than are the most penetrating metaphysical probing and the most sensitive poetic insights.

“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”

Richard Dawkins book Unweaving the Rainbow

[1998, Unweaving the Rainbow, London, Allen Lane, 9780713992144, 18827466M, Preface]
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

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Booker T. Washington 48

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