Quotes About Happiness

Sexual love, Peter, is a profoundly selfish emotion. And selfish emotions are not the ones that lead to happiness.

Why would you want it, if it's not the truth?" he asked. "What for?" "Now you see, that's the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn't understand it—would you?—if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists." "No

The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself. It is this last that Galt's statement summarizes.

She had always been...the motive power of her own happiness.

It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.

Ese muchacho es vulnerable. Posee demasiada capacidad para el placer. ¿Qué hará en un mundo donde existen tan raras ocasiones de dicha?

La felicidad sólo es posible al hombre racional, al hombre que sólo desea objetivos racionales, busca valores racionales y halla su goce en la ejecución de actos racionales.

But he had never been as happy as when he took her to fraternity dances. He had had many violent loves, when he swore he could not live without this girl or that; he forgot Catherine for weeks at a time and she never reminded him. He had always come back to her, suddenly, inexplicably, as he did tonight. Her

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy—so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients.

Una moralidad que se atreva a deciros que obtendréis la felicidad en la renunciación a vuestra dicha, que valoréis aquélla por el fracaso de vuestros valores, es una insolente negación de la moralidad.

Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

She nodded silently, unable to name as joy any part of the things she felt.

So few American novels have happy endings. Perhaps this is not surprising in a nation whose declaration of independence provides its citizens not with the right to happiness, but the right to its pursuit.

One can believe James's claim to an imagination of disaster; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.

We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole.

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.

What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Certain memories, like the imaginary balloons Yassi made with her delicate hands when she was happy, rise from somewhere in the depths of what we call memory. Like balloons, these memories are light and bright and irretrievable, despite the 'air sadness' (Bellow's term) surrounding them.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

I'd never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.

As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment

Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I'd become troubled by questions.