
“Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.”
The Simplest Way to be Happy (1933)
"The Country of Elusion" in The Trimmed Lamp http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8tlmp11h.htm (1907)
“Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.”
The Simplest Way to be Happy (1933)
"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)
If This Is a Man (1947)
Context: Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition, which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.
#happiness
“There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear.”
Speech at Columbia University (1949); published in Speeches 1949 - 1953 p. 402; as quoted in Sources of Indian Tradition (1988) by Stephen Hay, p. 350
Context: In times of crisis it is not unnatural for those who are involved in it deeply to regard calm objectivity in others as irrational, short-sighted, negative, unreal or even unmanly. But I should like to make it clear that the policy India has sought to pursue is not a negative and neutral policy. It is a positive and vital policy that flows from our struggle for freedom and from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Peace is not only an absolute necessity for us in India in order to progress and develop but also of paramount importance to the world. How can that peace be preserved? Not by surrendering to aggression, not by compromising with evil or injustice but also not by the talking and preparing for war! Aggression has to be met, for it endangers peace. At the same time, the lesson of the past two wars has to be remembered and it seems to me astonishing that, in spite of that lesson, we go the same way. The very processes of marshaling the world into two hostile camps precipitates the conflict that it had sought to avoid. It produces a sense of terrible fear and that fear darkens men's minds and leads them to wrong courses. There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear. As a great President of the United States said, there is nothing really to fear except fear itself.
Regards upcoming elections in Iraq http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1283005.htm, January 14, 2005.
2000s
Variant: Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. ow would you know happiness if you never experienced downs?
Source: P.S. I Love You
“I'm so happy to be engaged and look forward to a life of happiness with Liam.”
Miley Cyrus. — [Cyrus and Hemsworth get engaged, UPI NewsTrack, UPI News Service, June 6, 2012]
About