A Quote by Viktor E. Frankl
Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
Related Quotes
Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
Don't aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
There is no greater sin than desire, No greater curse than discontent, No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
The necessary thing for anyone to be happy and contented as long as he lives is working for the ones who will come after him rather than working for himself... One can reach the true delight and happiness in the life only by working for the existence, honor, and happiness of the future generations.
The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake.
Can the level of wealth enjoyed by members of capitalist culture (remembering that it is 25 times greater, on average, than that enjoyed by citizens of two centures ago) be attained by all but a very few? And if it can be attained, what is the cost for everything else that we must sacrifice?
Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.
To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
Meditation is enjoying oneself, just sitting silently doing nothing: happy, joyous without any reason, because all reasons come from outside. You meet a beautiful woman and you are happy, or you meet a beautiful man and you are happy - but the meditator is simply happy. His happiness has no reason from the outside world; his happiness wells up within himself.
You cannot will yourself to be happy while believing that you have no right to happiness, or that you are unworthy of it. You cannot tell yourself to release aggressive thoughts if you think it is wrong to free them, so you must come to grips with your beliefs in all instances.
This is something basic to be understood - the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved. And this becomes a problem.
We all desire things that we believe we cannot have, and so my films reflect that again and again. The mystery must be solved, the goal attained.
Success, like happiness, is the unexpected side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.
Related Authors
Abraham Maslow Quotes
American
Psychologist
Carl Jung Quotes
Swiss
Psychologist
Daniel Kahneman Quotes
Israeli
Psychologist
Edward de Bono Quotes
English
Psychologist
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quotes
American
Psychologist
Erich Fromm Quotes
American
Psychologist
James Hillman Quotes
American
Psychologist
M. Scott Peck Quotes
American
Psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes
Hungarian
Psychologist
Nathaniel Branden Quotes
American
Psychologist
Ram Dass Quotes
American
Psychologist
Rollo May Quotes
American
Psychologist
Sigmund Freud Quotes
Austrian
Psychologist
Tara Brach Quotes
American
Psychologist
Wayne Dyer Quotes
American
Psychologist