Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.
Hosea BallouRead
Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True happiness is easy to attain, but people often sacrifice too much for false happiness.
In this quote, Hosea Ballou suggests that genuine happiness is not complicated or costly, yet humans tend to invest significantly in seeking illusions of happiness that do not fulfill them. This highlights the irony of how we often prioritize superficial pleasures, neglecting the simple joys that lead to real contentment.
Themes
HappinessFalseContentmentJoyValue
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about finding joy in simple things.
More from Hosea Ballou
All quotes βReligion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation.
Hosea BallouRead
Similar quotes
Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
Lord ChesterfieldRead
All I've got to do today is smile.
Paul SimonRead
For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
Jonathan SwiftRead
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
Martin SeligmanRead
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
Willa CatherRead
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.
Samuel JohnsonRead