If human beings had genuine courage, they’d wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. 2.35K
Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up… a lot of people don’t have the courage to do it. 2.3K
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others. 566
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone. 757
For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed? 1.51K
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. 1.83K
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them. 1.12K
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure. 531
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. 2.47K
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five. 535
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. 526
Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. 677
Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race. 2.34K
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. 2.23K
Time is the most precious element of human existence. The successful person knows how to put energy into time and how to draw success from time. 1.24K