Stephen Paget and J.M.C. Crum, Francis Paget (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1912), pp. 25-26 [From a letter from Francis Paget to his sister c. 1870-72]:
"I have come to the conclusion that old china & a good conscience are, after all, the chief requisites for a happy life."
Ὧν ἡ σοφία παρασκευάζεται εἰς τὴν τοῦ ὅλου βίου μακαριότητα, πολὺ μέγιστόν ἐστιν ἡ τῆς φιλίας κτῆσις.
Of all the means wisdom procures sublime happiness throughout the entirety of one's life, the most important by far is the acquisition of friends.
Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, X.1.148 [27]. My translation.
horae quidem cedunt et dies et menses et anni, nec praeteritum tempus umquam revertitur nec quid sequatur sciri potest. quod cuique temporis ad vivendum datur, eo debet esse contentus.Cicero, On Old Age, 19.69. My translation.
Hours, days, months and years pass by, the past never returns, and the future cannot be known: but we should be content with whatever time we are given to live within.
Beauty meant that you were good. And being good meant being happy. Happiness can be defined all kinds of ways, but human beings, consciously or unconsciously, are always pulling for their own version of happiness. Even people who want to die see death as a kind of solace, and view ending their lives as the only way to make it there. Happiness is the base unit of consciousness, our single greatest motivator. Saying “I just want to be happy” trumps any other explanation. But who knows. Maybe Makiko had a more specific reason, not just some vague idea of how to make herself happy.Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs: A Novel (2020), p. 43.
"Were I but a king," said a country boy, " I would eat my fill of fat bacon, and swing upon a gate all day long."J. O. Halliwell-P hillipps & A.J. Storey, Cambridge Jokes: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 1842), p. 51.
There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), p. 624 [From G.K.’s Weekly, October 20, 1928].
Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), pp. 11-12:
Graham [Greene]’s hostility to the American “way of life” was exacerbated by what he considered a contemptible national quest for the Grail of happiness—the pursuit itself, as he felt, unworthily enshrined as an ideal in the nation’s founding Declaration, with the goal soon defined as materialism and indulgence. When we once spoke of Thomas Hardy’s lines explaining the poet’s refusal, on grounds of his own fateful view of existence, of an invitation to visit the United States—My ardours for emprize nigh lost—Graham said that he had no doubt that tears in plenty were shed in America; but that, without the shared pathos of acknowledged pain, they were shed in bafflement and felt as failure. Bringing to mind a theme of The Quiet American, he held that a policy of good cheer was often a repudiation of feeling: a licence for indifference or ruthlessness.
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years. . .
Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Torino: Einaudi, 1986; 1947), p. 23:
Tutti scoprono, più o meno presto nella loro vita, che la felicità perfetta non è realizzabile, ma pochi si soffermano invece sulla considerazione opposta: che tale è anche una infelicità perfetta.My translation.
Everyone discovers, sooner or later in their life, that perfect happiness is not possible, but few pause rather to consider the opposite: that the same is also true with regard to perfect unhappiness.