“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords”
Letter, June 8, 1762 [to an unnamed recipient], p. 103
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Context: Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.
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Samuel Johnson 362
English writer 1709–1784Related quotes
Source: Red Mars (1992), Chapter 2, “The Voyage Out” (p. 85)
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Section 280 http://books.google.com/books?id=msOwAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+search+for+happiness+is+one+of+the+chief+sources+of+unhappiness%22&pg=PA151#v=onepage
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
Context: May not the absolute and perfect eternal happiness be an eternal hope, which would die if it were realized? Is it possible to be happy without hope? And there is no place for hope once possession has been realized, for hope, desire, is killed by possession. May it not be, I say, that all souls grow without ceasing, some in a greater measure than others, but all having to pass some time through the same degree of growth, whatever that degree may be, and yet without ever arriving at the infinite, at God, to whom they continually approach? Is not eternal happiness an eternal hope, with its eternal nucleus of sorrow in order that happiness shall not be swallowed up in nothingness?
“He that sympathizes in all the happiness of others, perhaps himself enjoys the safest happiness.”
Vol. I; XXXIII
Lacon (1820)
"Outline" notes (September 1829), in The Writings of James Madison (1910) by Gaillard Hunt, Vol. 9, p. 357. Inscribed in the Madison Memorial Hall, Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.
1820s
"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)