A Quote by Marcus Aurelius

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

Marcus Aurelius

Quote Topics

Animal Consist Depends Does Doing Feeling Feels Happiness His Just Rational Social Unhappiness Vice Virtue

Quote Author

Marcus Aurelius
Roman - Leader
121 - 180

Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. … Aristotle, so far as I know, was the first man to proclaim explicitly that man is a rational animal. His reason for this view was … that some people can do sums. … It is in virtue of the intellect that man is a rational animal. The intellect is shown in various ways, but most emphatically by mastery of arithmetic. The Greek system of numerals was very bad, so that the multiplication table was quite difficult, and complicated calculations could only be made by very clever people.

Bertrand Russell

.. that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.

David Hume

A man's happiness or unhappiness depends as much on his temperament as on his destiny.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

My effort here is to create bliss, not happiness. Happiness is worthless; it depends on unhappiness. Bliss is transcendence: one moves beyond the duality of being happy and unhappy. One watches both; happiness comes, one watches and does not become identified with it. One does not say, 'I am happy. Peace, it is wonderful.' One simply watches, one says, 'Yes, a white cloud passing.'

Rajneesh

The whole movement of happiness, unhappiness, happiness, unhappiness, could be called unhappiness. You're suffering because your state of mind is in flux, moving back and forth. The ego's happiness is really a form of suffering, because it cannot live without unhappiness.

Eckhart Tolle

It depends on education--that holder of the keys which the Almighty hath put into our hands--to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or misery.

Philip Sidney

Power doesn't create happiness or unhappiness. It depends how you use it. Wisdom is the guiding force that directs happiness.

Frederick Lenz

What is happiness and unhappiness? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on what happens inside a person. I am grateful for every day and that makes me happy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.

Aristotle

Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy . . . Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values, and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

Ayn Rand

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.

James D. Watson

Man, being not only a religious, but also a social being, requires for the promotion of his rational happiness religious institutions, which, while they give a proper direction to devotion, at the same time make a wise and profitable improvement of his social feelings.