There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.
Interpretation
Pursuing wealth and productivity should not come at the cost of our happiness.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton emphasizes that societal pressures to achieve more—whether in terms of wealth, productivity, or status—should not take precedence over individual happiness. He argues that true fulfillment comes from prioritizing joy and satisfaction rather than succumbing to external expectations of success.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one might say this quote to encourage others to reassess their priorities.
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.
Make peace with your body, it's not manmade, there are no flaws, there are no mistakes.
It is not selfish to be happy. It is your highest purpose. Your joy is the greatest contribution you can make to life on the planet. A heart at peace with its owner blesses everyone it touches.
My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.
Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.
Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain
I think self-knowledge is a key to happiness.We can build happy lives only on the foundation of our own natures, our own values, and our own interests.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.