
“Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.”
#104
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
#102
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
“Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.”
#104
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
“The Philippines is where Asia wears a smile. Beautiful products can only be made by happy people.”
At a press conference in Bloomingdale's, at the opening of the Philippine exhibit, cited in Ang Katipunan (May 1982).
Mustapha Mond, in Ch. 16<!-- p. 228-->
Source: Brave New World (1932)
Context: I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. … It's curious … to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
Essay "Distractions I" in Vedanta for the Western World (1945) edited by Christopher Isherwood
“Happiness is not a goal… it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
Variant: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 95
Context: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Actually by Stendhal: "La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur" (Beauty is no more than the promise of happiness), in De L'Amour (1822), chapter 17
Misattributed
“Beauty is but the cloak of happiness. Where joy tarries, there also is beauty.”
Source: Rhythmen und Runen (1944), p. 468
“Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.”
Freedom and the control of men (1955/1956) American Scholar, 25 (1), 47-65.
"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)