We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
Daniel DennettRead
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True happiness comes from dedicating yourself to a cause greater than yourself.
This quote by Daniel Dennett suggests that genuine happiness is achieved when we focus our energies on something that transcends our own personal desires and ambitions. By finding and committing ourselves to a purpose that is more significant than our individual selves, we can experience fulfillment and joy that goes beyond mere self-interest.
Themes
HappinessDedicationPurposeSelflessnessFulfillment
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about finding purpose in life.
More from Daniel Dennett
All quotes βPhilosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so often it takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
Daniel DennettRead
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Daniel DennettRead
Some philosophers can't bear to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t," thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor, even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving d, m, and t.
Daniel DennettRead
As every scuba diver knows, panic is your worst enemy: when it hits, your mind starts to thrash and you are likely to do something really stupid and self-destructive.
Daniel DennettRead
If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?
Daniel DennettRead
Similar quotes
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,_x000D_ _x000D_ Beloved from pole to pole.
Samuel Taylor ColeridgeRead
Happiness only real when shared.
Christopher MccandlessRead
These firecrackers outside and these lights outside cannot make you rejoice. They are only for children; for you, they are just a nuisance. But in your inner world there can be a continuity of lights, songs, joys. Always remember that society compensates you when it feels that the repressed may explode into a dangerous situation if it is not compensated. Society finds some way of allowing you to let out the repressed. But this is not true celebration, and it cannot be true.
RajneeshRead
One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
William Carlos WilliamsRead
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother TeresaRead
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
Aldous HuxleyRead