Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
For certainly there cannot be a higher pleasure than to think that we love and are beloved by the most amiable and best Being.
If you'd be beloved, make yourself amiable. A true friend is the best possession.
In this regard, pleasure is an event; happiness is a process. Pleasure is an end point; happiness is the journey. Pleasure is material; happiness is spiritual. Pleasure is self-involved; happiness is outer- and other-involved.
Pleasure is not the goal of man, but knowledge. Pleasure and happiness comes to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal. The cause of all the miseries we have in the world is that men foolishly think pleasure to be the ideal to strive for. After a time man finds that it is not happiness, but knowledge, towards which he is going, and that both pleasure and pain are great teachers.
Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.
The happiness of those who want to be popular depends on others; the happiness of those who seek pleasure fluctuates with moods outside their control; but the happiness of the wise grows out of their own free acts.
We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment - as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained.
To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.
I think we all mistake certain things for happiness. I think we mistake comfort for happiness and we mistake pleasure for happiness, and entertainment for happiness, when really these are just things we use as proxies for our happiness. We use them to cheer us up or try and achieve brief happiness, when really happiness is something much more profound and long lasting and exists within us.
My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.
The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. 'Behold , just now the world ... entire love. And woman must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man's disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.
The lover's pleasure is in the pleasure of the beloved. The lover is satisfied when the beloved is fed. The lover is vain when the beloved is adorned.
The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
That you may be beloved, be amiable.
The Constitution of America only guarantees pursuit of happiness-you have to catch up with it yourself. Fortunately, happiness is something that depends not on position but on disposition, and life is what you make it.