Perpetual Euphoria Quotes

“Today, luxury resides in everything that is becoming rare: communion with nature, silence, meditation, slowness rediscovered, the pleasure of living out of step with others, studious idleness, the enjoyment of the major works of the mind - these are all privileges that cannot be bought because they are literally priceless.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Our societies put into the category of the pathological what other cultures consider normal - the preponderance of pain - and put into the category of the normal and even the necessary what others see as exceptional - the feeling of happiness. The question is not whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors: our conception of happiness has changed, and to change utopias is to change constraints. But we are probably living in the world's first societies that make people unhappy not to be happy.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Some people's happiness is always other people's kitsch.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Happiness is no longer a stroke of good luck, a moment of splendor wrung from the monotony of the everyday, it is our condition, our destiny. when the desirable becomes possible, it is immediately integrated into the category of the necessary. What used to be edenic is now ordinary. Social status is no longer determined soley by wealth or power, but also by appearance: it is not enough to be rich, you also have to look good, and this produces a new kind of discrimination and invidious comparison that is no less severe. There is a whole ethic of seeming to feel good about oneself that governs us and is supported by the smiling intoxication of advertising and merchandise.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Instead of admitting that happiness is an art of the indirect that is achieved or not through secondary goals, it is presented as if it were an immediately accessible objective, and recipes are provided. Whatever the method chosen, psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, the presupposition is everywhere the same: contentment is within your reach, all you have to do is undergo a "positive conditioning," an "ethical discipline" that will lead you to it. This amounts to an astonishing inversion of the will, which seeks to establish its protectorate over psychic states and feelings that are traditionally outside its jurisdiction. It wears itself our trying to change what does not depend on it (at the risk of not dealing with what can be changed).”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“O tempo, esse grande ladrão, rouba continuamente; mas uma coisa é ser despojado com magnificência e envelhecer com a consciência de uma existência plena e rica, outra é ser roído miseravelmente hora após hora por coisas que de todo não conhecemos. O inferno dos contemporâneos chama-se monotonia. O paraíso que procuram a plenitude. Existem aqueles que viveram e aqueles que duraram.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Seeking to eliminate pain nonetheless puts it at the heart of the system. As a result, today we suffer from not wanting to suffer just as one can make oneself ill by trying to be perfectly healthy. Furthermore, we now tell ourselves a strange fable about a society completely devoted to hedonism, and for which everything becomes an irritation, a torture. Unhappiness is not only unhappiness;
it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“We now have every right except the right not to be blissful.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“To happiness in the strict sense, we may prefer pleasure, as a brief moment of ecstasy stolen in the course of things, gaiety, the lighthearted drunkenness that accompanies life's development, and especially joy, which presupposes surprise and elation. For nothing can compete with the irruption in our lives of an event or a being that ravages and ravishes us. There is always too much to desire, to discover, to love. And we leave the stage having hardly tasted the feast.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Formerly irreconcilable enemies, morality and happiness have fused; today, it is being unhappy that is immoral; the superego has moved into the citadel of felicity and governs it with an iron hand. The end of culpability comes at the price of endless torment. Pleasure is no longer a promise but a problem. The idea of full satisfaction has replaced that of constraint, and it has in turn become a requirement that full satisfaction be achieved. Each of us is responsible for being in good shape, in a good mood, and no longer has to renounce anything; instead, we have to adapt to a process of improvement that rejects any resistance to change. Order has ceased to condemn us or deprive us; now it shows us, with maternal solicitude, how to fulfill ourselves.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Terrível alternância da pergunta: o que há de novo?e da resposta: nada a assinalar! Se o remorso, segundo Baudelaire, é impotência para desfazer, pelo contrário, a banalidade é a incapacidade para fazer, para inaugurar o novo, para abrir uma brecha na massa dos instantes todos iguais. A este mundo caseiro não falta no entanto sedução para quem deseje deixar-se viver, ser levado como uma barca por um rio abaixo, delegar nas datas do calendário, à passagem das estações, o cuidado de nos dirigir. Fruicção sedativa desta rotina: com ela tudo é evidente, reveste de necessidade o que à primeira vista era gratuito. Nela funciona-se em regime quase automático. A agonia que a alguns provocam os domingos ou as férias - esse grande vazio que é necessário preencher - nasce dessa ruptura momentânea de uma regra que enfada mais do que tranquiliza. Para a maioria, portanto, a maldição do quotidiano é de nos acompanhar 24 sobre 24 horas quando gostaríamos de o desmontar a nosso bel-prazer, de lhe dedicar algumas migalhas, enfim, de o colocar numa posição crítica. «Oh vida, amo-te mas não todos os dias» (Cerroli), admirável frase que tudo resume.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“that we are not surprised to find John Paul II mentioning euthanasia and the last instants of life and praising “the person who voluntarily accepts suffering and forgoes treatment to reduce pain in order to retain all his lucidity and, if he is a believer, to take part in the Lord’s Passion,” even if–and the concession is important–such “heroic” behavior “cannot be considered a duty for everyone.”
― Pascal Bruckner, L'Euphorie perpétuelle: Essai sur le devoir de bonheur

“How’s it going?” People have not always greeted each other in this way: they invoked divine protection for themselves, and they did not bow before a commoner the way they bowed before a nobleman. In order for the formula “How’s it going?” to appear, we had to leave the feudal world and enter the democratic era, which presupposes a minimal degree of equality between individuals, subject to oscillations in their moods. According to one legend, the French expression “ça va?” is of medical origin: how do you defecate? A vestige of a time when intestinal regularity was seen as a sign of good health.

This lapidary, standardized formality corresponds to the principle of economy and constitutes the minimal social bond in a mass society that seeks to include people from all over. But it is sometimes less a routine than a way of intimating something: we want to force the person met to situate himself, we want to petrify him, subject him to a detailed examination. What are you up to? What’s happened to you? A discreet summons that commands everyone to expose himself for what he really is. In a world that makes movement a canonical value, there is an interest in how things are going, even if we don’t know where. That’s why a “how’s it going?” that expects no answer is more human than one that is full of concern but wants to strip you bare and force you to give a moral accounting for yourself. This is because the fact of being is no longer taken for granted, and we have to pay permanent attention to our internal barometers. Are things going as well as I say, or am I embellishing them? That is why many people evade the question and move to another topic, assuming that the interlocutor is perceptive enough to discern in their “fine” a discreet depression. Then there is this terrible expression of renunciation: “Okay, I guess,” as if one had to let the days and hours pass without taking part in them. But why, after all, do things have to be going well? Asked daily to justify ourselves, it often happens that we are so opaque to ourselves that the answer no longer has any meaning other than as a formality.

“You’re looking good today.” Flowing over us like honey, this compliment has the effect of a kind of consecration: in the confrontation between the radiant and the grouchy, I am on the right side. And now I am, through a bit of verbal magic, raised to the summit of a subtle and ever-changing hierarchy. But the following day another, ruthless verdict is handed down: “You look terrible today.” This observation executes me at point-blank range, deprives me of the splendid position where I thought I had taken up permanent residence. I have not proven worthy of the caste of the magnificent, I am a pariah and have to slink along walls, trying to conceal the fact that I look ill.

Ultimately, “how’s it going?” is the most futile and the most profound of questions. To answer it precisely, one would have to make a scrupulous inventory of one’s psyche, considering each aspect in detail. No matter: we have to say “fine” out of politeness and civility and change the subject, or else ruminate the question during our whole lives and reserve our reply for afterward.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“de acum înainte avem toate drepturile, mai puţin acela de a nu fi fericiţi.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Let everyone be left free not to be happy without feeling ashamed, or to be happy episodically as one sees fit. Issue no decisions, make no laws, impose nothing. If we do not want a legitimate aspiration to degenerate into a collective punishment, we must treat the pitiless idol of happiness with the most extreme disrespect.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Talvez seja este o paradoxo: a busca da vida deve obedecer a duas injunções contraditórias. Aproveitar plenamente aquilo que recebemos, mas permanecer à escuta do que se passa algures. (...) De um lado, a filosofia do carpe diem que nos convida a considerar cada dia como se fosse o último, do outro, da esperança do melhor, recusa da felicidade imposta (pelo família, pela ordem social) em nome de uma felicidade desejada.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Em definitivo, nós somos tão donos do clima como de nós mesmos e deciframos o céu com a mesma perplexidade que os movimentos do nosso coração. Quanto à analogia feita entre a atmosfera e o humor, ela não é segura: um sol esplendoroso pode-nos ferir com a sua exuberância, a neve e o nevoeiro podem-nos mergulhar num júbilo perene.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Dispomos de um excesso de tempo que nos acaba por faltar a partir do momento em que já passou.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Se bem que, cruel engano, nós nos afastemos com frequência da felicidade através dos meus que verdadeiramente nos deveriam dela aproximar. Daí os frequentes equívocos a seu respeito: que deve ser reivindicado como um dever, aprendido como uma matéria escolar, construído como uma casa: que se compra, qual moeda, que outros enfim possuem de fonte segura e que basta imitá-los para sermos inundados como eles pela mesma aura.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“A infelicidade não é só a infelicidade: é, ainda pior, o fracasso da felicidade.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy