“Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison.”

Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117
The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

Source: Hector and the Search for Happiness

Source: Brave New World

Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)
Context: Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

A History of the Jews (1987).

Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 147
Context: There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. … The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter I, Section I, On Value, p. 5

Socrates speaking to Alcibiades
Alcibiades I