Happiness
The good life or well-being that people seek for its own sake; its nature has been debated since antiquity.
Works to read
- On Happiness: Letter to Menoeceus and Principal Doctrines by Epicurus, c. 300 BC
- Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle, 1836
- The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, c. 340 BCE · Great Books
- Ethics by Baruch Spinoza, 1677 · Great Books
- Critique of Practical Reason by Immanuel Kant, 1788 · Great Books
- The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, 1797 · Great Books
- The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson, 1759
- Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851
- Essays, Moral and Political (selection) by David Hume, 1741-1752
- A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, 1971
Passages
From the texts
So then Happiness is manifestly something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all things which are and may be done.
— Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
That happiness is one or more of these things, pretty well everybody agrees.
— Aristotle, Rhetoric
Verified quotations
One feast, one house, one mutual happiness
— William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona
happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Oh! all too happy tillers of the soil, Could they but know their blessedness
— Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics
If you take away the average man’s life-lie you take away his happiness at the same time
— Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder and The Wild Duck
It is, therefore, a contradiction to say that a man is in duty bound to advance his own happiness with all his power
— Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
Hence also morality is not properly the doctrine how we should make ourselves happy, but how we should become worthy of happiness.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Passages are verified quotations from the library that use one of these words: happiness, happy, blessed, blessedness. Sentences under “From the texts” are copied word for word from the full texts in this library. Read each in its context on the work's page.