“We don't know happiness without unhappiness, gaiety without sadness, and happiness can only be felt if you don't set any conditions.”
Statement made to a correspondent in Paris in 1976 — reported in John Callcott, United Press International (December 21, 1982) "Arthur Rubinstein, At Age 95; Concert Pianist and Bon Vivant, Boston Globe.
Attributed
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Arthur Rubinstein 15
Polish-American classical pianist 1887–1982Related quotes
Ibid., p. 328
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Não há felicidade senão com conhecimento. Mas o conhecimento da felicidade é infeliz; porque conhecer-se feliz é conhecer-se passando pela felicidade, e tendo, logo já, que deixá-la atrás. Saber é matar, na felicidade como em tudo. Não saber, porém, é não existir.
Interviewed in Paris Review, Summer 1955; reprinted in Malcolm Cowley (ed.) Writers at Work (New York: Viking Press, 1959) p. 146.
“But you don't let true happiness slip out of your grasp without one helluva fight.”
Source: That Perfect Someone
Oskar's grandmother to his grandfather after she told him of her pregnancy.
"My Feelings" (p. 180)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 2: Nothing To Be Transformed
Context: Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing. Whether one is here in India or Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one without the other. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism.
“If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.”
First known in Thomas Fuller's Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs (1732), but not found in the writings of Edmund Burke.
Misattributed