Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.
Interpretation
Happiness is an enigmatic experience that shouldn't be overly analyzed or reduced to logic.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that happiness is an intrinsic and complex quality akin to religion, which often transcends reason and justification. By emphasizing that happiness should not be rationalized, he invites us to embrace its mysterious nature and recognize that it can be deeply felt without the need for logical explanation or analysis.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about mental well-being to emphasize the importance of embracing the natural flow of happiness.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.
There is so much to love and to admire in this life that it is an act of ingratitude not to be happy and content in this existence.
...Be grateful for what you have to be thankful for instead of complaining about the little things that annoy you.
A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself and that is what few things can do.
Our own true nature is Infinite Joy! _x000D_ Always happy, Always peaceful, Always free.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.