The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
Interpretation
Happiness stems from having a clear conscience and being at peace with oneself.
In this quote, Edward Gibbon emphasizes that the foundation of true happiness lies in maintaining a clear conscience. When one acts with integrity and honesty, free of guilt or moral dilemmas, they achieve a state of emotional and mental clarity that allows for genuine happiness. This suggests that our inner moral state significantly impacts our overall sense of well-being.
In practice
In a speech about personal values, one might say, 'As Edward Gibbon stated, the first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.'
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.
Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.
I'm from New Orleans, which is all about direct engagement out in the street with all the parades and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals. I'm trying to take that and put it into my generation, a group that doesn't have enough joy and celebration in their lives.
I am so fresh in soul and spirit that life gushes and bubbles around me in a thousand springs.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.