Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.
Interpretation
True happiness comes from maintaining love for what brings us joy throughout our lives.
This quote reflects the idea that the ability to retain and cherish the loves and joys of childhood indicates a wholeness of spirit. Rather than being fragmented by life's experiences, those who still hold on to their early passions and affections remain unified and enriched by those memories, leading to a fulfilling and authentic existence.
In practice
In a speech about life lessons, one might emphasize the importance of holding onto childhood joys.
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.
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.
When you find yourself ready to complain about what you don't have, stop for a moment to consider what incredible things you do have. And resolve to make the most of it all.
Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.'
I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.
A smile happens in a flash, but its memory can last a lifetime.
In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds.
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