Pursuit of Happyness Quotes
1. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
2. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.
3. Learn to say no to demands, requests, invitations, and activities that leave you with no time for yourself. Until I learned to say no, and mean it, I was always overloaded by stress. You may feel guilty and selfish at first for guarding your down- time, but you’ll soon find that you are a much nicer, more present, more productive person in each instance you do choose to say yes.
4. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
5. God put Santa Claus on earth to remind us that Christmas is ‘sposed to be a happy time.
6. In pursuit of happiness, smart people often end up dumbing down themselves.
7. Happiness is the most tired word in any language.
8. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.
9. I’m not in pursuit of happiness, I’m happiness in pursuit; ready to happen everywhere I go.
10. Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy–which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances…If the sun is shining, stand in it—yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass–they have to because time passes. The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered. What you are pursuing is meaning— a meaningful life. There’s the hap– the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use—that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms. The pursuit isn’t all or nothing— it’s all AND nothing.
11. When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can’t change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .
12. Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
13. Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think – not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment – on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.
14. Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
15. The realization of dreams, like every battle for freedom, has always required compromise to one degree or another. When the result of a concession, however, is the mutilation of your soul or the cancellation of someone else’s future, then it may be said the desired goal was corrupted or destroyed rather than attained.
16. From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man’s Creator.
17. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality
18. Let people be the pursuits of happiness, you be the pursuit of perfection.
19. Happiness is merely a consolation for not yet being dead.
20. Stop killing my children. Have it all. My civil liberties. My basic human rights. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. And though I will struggle to refrain from telling you how much of an ingenious coward you are; you win.
21. An untamed mind is usually engaged in the pursuit of unhappiness (or even more unhappiness).
22. It should seem as if there were a few green sunny spots in the desert of life, to which we are always hastening forward: we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not what perils or suffering we endure, so that we arrive at them at last.
23. To travel far is to search for joy and well being in order to pursue the one thing we desire the most which is our happiness that lies within ourselves.
24. Imagine how much more crazy money would drive us if we could each drive more than one car at the same time.
25. It is in the pursuits for the good of humanity and through purposeful deeds and endeavors that you own your power and soar to extraordinary levels of living.
26. Better believe it, those in pursuit of Happiness can’t expect to remain unchanged.
27. Pursue happiness and you’ll be unhappy, pursue purpose and you’ll be happy.
28. She would wait until she wandered around this room filled with people she knew and loved, until she had wished every last one of them a new year filled with hope and dreams and yearning. She would not wish any of them success or prosperity or wealth because the magic was in the dreaming. She knew that now. America had taught her that. How wise, to talk about the pursuit of happiness and not of happiness itself.
29. The thing whose acquisition ‘made’ you happy need not be stolen, lost, or broken for ‘it’ to make you unhappy.
30. Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.
31. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
32. It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.
33. Do not pursue a life that looks good. Pursue a life that is good.
34. Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’- he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live
35. It could be said of him that while others chased the mirage of happiness, he was happy with being content.
36. This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
37. Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day.
38. A true saying it is, ‘Desire hath no rest;‘ is infinite in itself, endless; and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill, according to Austin, still going round as in a ring.
39. I think the conscientious pursuit of happiness by itself can validate decisions to change, to try again, especially when failure to change will lead to lives of duplicity, dishonesty, and deceit.
41. Pleasure feels better than pain. Make the pursuit of pleasure your guide.
42. The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question, for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many other manifestations of which are already familiar to us. Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals, unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and became extinct before man set eyes on them.
43. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
44. When you say you are in pursuit of happiness, what you essentially mean is that you are expecting your environment to always act in ways that would elicit an emotion of happiness in your heart. It is exactly as absurd as it sounds.
45. Have pleasure from the pursuit.
46. Happiness is a reality of NOW, it not not something that you pursue in the future. Don’t pursue happiness, but EXUDE happiness.
47. Meditate upon yourself and you’ll find bliss.
48. The value of life is lost when the pursuit of money becomes the goal as opposed to the pursuit of true happiness.
49. There is no great path to greatness than true service. He who knows how to serve from a true heart and spirit knows what it takes to be truly great
50. One of the most lucrative privileges of an empty handed is the easiness to embrace wholeheartedly!
51. As long as you are pursuing happiness, you do not have it.
52. Don’t cry for them to be happy. Find courage to overcome the circumstance.
53. We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the word ‘happiness’ only relates to the last. In conformity with this dichotomy in his aims, man’s activity develops in two directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main, or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
54. If you think about it for a moment, destiny is not a synonym of circumstance.
55. We discover the vast difference between living and feeling alive when we discover inspiration.” The quickest way to true happiness is not by ambling and obsessing about the limited pursuit of happiness, but by the immediate and actionable pursuit to be inspired.
56. I have pursued the comfort of things, when all along Comfort is a Person.
57. In this world, the pursuit of dreams leads to a life so painful and frustrating the mere thought of it is enough to merit a sigh.
58. There is far more happiness in a life that is your own than a life in which you are handed the lines to say and shown the gestures to make. Do not ever be ambitious.
59. How simple it is to acknowledge that all the worry in the world could not control the future. How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and that there will never be a time when it is not now.
60. Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
