“Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.”

— Robert Anthony

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Robert Anthony 3

professional wrestler 1982

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“I’d rather be happy and odd than miserable and ordinary,' she said, sticking her chin in the air.”

Michelle Magorian (1947) English children's writer

Source: Good Night, Mr. Tom

“Most of the people are placing too much emphasis of their happiness on price, rather than on value.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Most people would rather be sheep than stand on their own with antlers on.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

“Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.”

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)

“The purely selfish happiness of certain Epicureans is a chimera, an abstraction, an impossibility; the true human pleasures are all more or less social. Pure egoism, rather than being an affirmation of the self, is a mutilation of the self.”

Jean-Marie Guyau (1854–1888) French writer and philosopher

Outline of a Morality Without Obligation or Sanction https://www.marxists.org/archive/guyau/1885/morality.htm (1885).
Context: A third equivalent of duty is borrowed from sensibility and not, like the preceding, from intelligence and activity. It’s the growing fusion of sensibilities, and the ever increasing sociable character of elevated pleasures, from which results a kind of duty or superior necessity which pushes us naturally and rationally towards others. By virtue of evolution, our pleasures grow and become increasingly impersonal; we cannot experience enjoyment within our selves as if on a deserted isle. Our milieu, to which we better adapt ourselves every day, is human society, and we can no more be happy outside of this milieu than we can breathe outside the air. The purely selfish happiness of certain Epicureans is a chimera, an abstraction, an impossibility; the true human pleasures are all more or less social. Pure egoism, rather than being an affirmation of the self, is a mutilation of the self.