“Pleasure is the happiness of madmen, while happiness is the pleasure of sages,” wrote the French novelist and critic Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly. Some people even enjoy vengeance and torturing other human beings. In the same vein, a businessman may rejoice in the ruin of a competitor, a thief revel in his booty, a spectator at a bullfight exult in the bull’s death. But these are only passing, sometimes morbid states of elation that, like moments of positive euphoria, have nothing to do with happiness. The fervid and almost mechanical quest for sensual pleasures is another example of
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