A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.
Albert Einstein, “Theory of Happiness,” 1922
Anger can revert to happiness, annoyance can revert to joy, but a vanquished state cannot be revived, the dead cannot be brought back to life.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE
Plague, like abstraction, was monotonous … Abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness. … He was enabled to follow, and on a different plane, the dreary struggle in progress between each man’s happiness and the abstractions of the plague - which constituted the whole life of our town over a long period of time.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Wait for the final day. Call no man happy until he is dead and his body is lain to rest in the grave.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8 CE
Happiness is cultivating your own garden.
Voltaire, “On Happiness,” c. 1750
As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!
Not sense perception, in which we experience things directly and close at hand, but imagination, coming after it, prepares the objects of our thought. Before we raise such questions as What is happiness, what is justice, what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration. Furthermore, we must repeat the direct experience in our minds after leaving the scene where it took place. To say it again, every thought is an after-thought. By repeating in imagination, we de-sense whatever had been given to our senses.
Hannah Arendt, “Life of the Mind” Gifford Lecture, 1973
There wasn't any limit, no boundary at all to the future. And it wouldn't be so a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952 (via circle)
If the land is the site of life and culture, of community and nation, then “unland” would be its radical negation. a poetic neologism it implicitly retracts the promises contained in its linguistic kin "utopia," the no-place of an imagined, alternative future. Thus far from embodying the imagination of another and better world, unland is the obverse of utopia, a land where even "normal" life with all its contradictions, pains, and promises, happiness and miseries has become unlivable.
Andreas Huyssen, "Doris Salcedo's Memory Sculpture" from Present Pasts, 2003
nickkahler reblogged
existentialistsadness-deactivat
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
Søren Kierkegaard, "On Movement vs. Idleness," c. 1840 (via emergencies)
The American dream is to get wealthy enough to get a little house, which then might become a big house, and then a mansion. And happiness, it’s at your door. This is a lie of astounding proportion, because what we are really doing is cultivating the notion of hermitage. We are all hermits who try to affirm their own presence, with a persuasion or conviction that we can control our destiny as soon as we can control our little area somewhere on the planet. Within our domain, we do what we like to do. But that’s a delusion really. We are interdependent, so as individuals, we will not survive. There is no animal species that can survive independently.
Paolo Soleri, "GreenSource Interview," 2009
Structure of a Chemical Synapse, c. 2011
Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is.
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 1946 (via atlantic)