A Quote by Richard Hofstadter

As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.

Richard Hofstadter

Quote Topics

Elusive Gratifying Happiness Itself Often Out Pursuit Pursuit Of Happiness Truth Truth Is Turns Whereas

Quote Author

Richard Hofstadter
American - Historian
August 6, 1916 - October 24, 1970

I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.

Jamaica Kincaid

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.

David McCullough

The pursuit of excellence is gratifying and healthy. The pursuit of perfection is frustrating, neurotic, and a terrible waste of time.

Ed Bliss

The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

Whittaker Chambers

"Pursuit of happiness" implies that we're running after happiness and happiness is running away from us. It also implies that happiness is somewhere out there, in material goods, which we have to pursue, whereas I believe that it is an illusion happiness is not out there, it is within us.

Satish Kumar

When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

Martin Scorsese

The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

You know what made us the biggest, meanest, Big Mac eating, calorie-counting, world-dominating kick-ass powerhouse country in the history of the human race? The pursuit of happiness. Not happiness. The pursuit.

Will Ferguson

For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.

Matthew Stewart

With all respect to Mr. Jefferson, I would put the pursuit of wisdom ahead of the pursuit of happiness.

Edmund Fuller

Thomas Jefferson was a real poet. He was slick with that 'pursuit' of happiness because the 'pursuit' puts it back on you.

Will Smith

I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.

Parker Palmer

If there ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness cannot come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you need to have more than one trait. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens.

Theodore Roosevelt

My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.

Charles Saatchi

If you look at Citadel today, that's really - the founding principle of the firm is a real pursuit of talent, a pursuit of people who have a passion for finance, and a pursuit of individuals who make good decisions day in and day out.