In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
Interpretation
Happiness is a fundamental right worth pursuing, but its true essence remains elusive.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver reflects on the cultural significance of happiness, particularly how its pursuit is recognized as a fundamental right in the Declaration of Independence. She questions the very nature of happiness, suggesting that despite its societal importance, the understanding of what happiness truly is can be complex and subjective.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding one's purpose in life.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
I believe in an individual soul which travels through eternity. This life is far from all there is--in fact, it is a minute part, simply an antechamber, a deciding place where we choose the light from the dark, where we come to know what we truly value.
We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.
America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.
The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.
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