Pursuit Of Happiness Quotes

“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.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.

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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Holly Mosier

“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.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“God put Santa Claus on earth to remind us that Christmas is 'sposed to be a happy time.”
― Bil Keane, Jeffy's Lookin' at Me

“In pursuit of happiness, smart people often end up dumbing down themselves.”
― Erol Ozan

“Happiness is the most tired word in any language.”
― Erol Ozan

“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade...”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I'm not in pursuit of happiness, I'm happiness in pursuit; ready to happen everywhere I go.”
― Bernard Kelvin Clive

“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.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“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.”
― Aberjhani, Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“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.

In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rests. Called “virtue” by America’s Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).”
― David A. Norris, Restoring Education: Central to American Greatness Fifteen Principles That Liberated Mankind from the Politics of Tyranny

“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”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Let people be the pursuits of happiness, you be the pursuit of perfection.”
― Amit Kalantri

“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.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, with All the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It. in Three Partitions; With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medically, Historically Opened and Cut Up

“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.”
― Sigmund Freud

“If the universe comes melting down around you in searing flames and yet you remain alive...

If all the minds of the world bind themselves to insanity and yet you retain your intellectual liberty...

If darkness dissolves the dreams of everyone you know leaving not even a glint of inspiration...

Look within, and pursue your own happiness, pursue it to the f*cking glorious end.”
― S.W. Southwick

“I have pursued the comfort of things, when all along Comfort is a Person.”
― Erin M. Straza, Comfort Detox: Finding Freedom from Habits That Bind You

“Happiness is merely a consolation for not yet being dead.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Majid Kazmi, The First Dancer: How to be the first among equals and attract unlimited opportunities

“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.”
― Wataru Watari, やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている 3

“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.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“An untamed mind is usually engaged in the pursuit of unhappiness (or even more unhappiness).”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Stupidity is happiness.”
― Arif Naseem

“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.”
― William Hazlitt, The Round Table, Vol. 1: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners

“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.”
― Jeff Morco