To fill the hour──that is happiness.
Interpretation
Happiness comes from how we choose to spend our time.
In this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he suggests that true happiness is derived from how we occupy our time and the activities we choose to engage in. Rather than seeking happiness as an elusive goal, it emphasizes the importance of filling our hours meaningfully, indicating that the moments we create for ourselves contribute significantly to our overall sense of joy and fulfillment.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about work-life balance.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Happiness belongs to the self sufficient.
I never had everything I wanted, but I never wanted for anything.
Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Continuity of purpose is one of the most essential ingredients of happiness in the long run, and for most men that comes chiefly through their work.
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
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