
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.”
Source: Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Context: Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
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Elizabeth Gilbert 232
American writer 1969Related quotes


“Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.”

“Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.”
Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10
Context: Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence. The Omnipotent Himself could never be supposed by any, save those who out of their own human selfishness construct the attributes of Divinity, to be absorbed throughout eternity in the contemplation of His own ineffable bliss, were it not identical with His ineffable goodness and love.

“Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions.”
P 8
Women As Lovers (1994)

Source: Shades of Milk and Honey (2010), Chapter 3 (p. 38)

“We must tackle the causes of personal debt, and not just the consequences.”
Citizens Advice Bureaux (August 15, 2007)

The Law of Mind (1892)
Context: Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality. The mere carrying out of predetermined purposes is mechanical. This remark has an application to the philosophy of religion. It is that genuine evolutionary philosophy, that is, one that makes the principle of growth a primordial element of the universe, is so far from being antagonistic to the idea of a personal creator, that it is really inseparable from that idea; while a necessitarian religion is in an altogether false position and is destined to become disintegrated. But a pseudo-evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above the principle of growth is at once scientifically unsatisfactory, as giving no possible hint of how the universe has come about, and hostile to all hopes of personal relations to God.

Variant: Those who have courage and faith shall never perish in misery
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl