Happiness Cannot Be Measured Quotes

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Get Off The Scale! You are beautiful. Your beauty, just like your capacity for life, happiness, and success, is immeasurable. Day after day, countless people across the globe get on a scale in search of validation of beauty and social acceptance. Get off the scale! I have yet to see a scale that can tell you how enchanting your eyes are. I have yet to see a scale that can show you how wonderful your hair looks when the sun shines its glorious rays on it. I have yet to see a scale that can thank you for your compassion, sense of humor, and contagious smile. Get off the scale because I have yet to see one that can admire you for your perseverance when challenged in life. It’s true, the scale can only give you a numerical reflection of your relationship with gravity. That’s it. It cannot measure beauty, talent, purpose, life force, possibility, strength, or love. Don’t give the scale more power than it has earned. Take note of the number, then get off the scale and live your life. You are beautiful!

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.

Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact--on this earth where nothing is complete--one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able at all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she gives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of the fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustling of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, going out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every moment; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in darkness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty.

Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.

And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties - if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!{PlainDealer+} Yet even such a life as this does run some risk of scorn, if everything lies open to everybody; for there are those who disdain whatever has become too familiar. But neither does virtue run any risk of being despised when she is brought close to the eyes, and it is better to be scorned by reason of simplicity than tortured by perpetual pretence.

There as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose it's meaning if it were not balanced by sadness"- Carl Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'--it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking...One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole--there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole...

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness." Carl Jung

This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they would´t be rich. Another is that if you´re not rich, don´t worry about it, because rich people aren´t really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage. The vast degree to which my mental health improved once I had the smallest measure of economic security immediately unmasked this shameful fiction to me. Money cannot buy happiness, but it buys the conditions for happiness: time, occasional freedom from constantly worry, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and the ability to be generous.

Don't get me wrong. A good marriage, adequate financial resources, even a clean home and well-behaved children do bring some measure of happiness. However, temporal blessings, as wonderful as they may be, are only a taste of the real thing. They cannot sustain inner happiness any more than eating a scrumptious meal keeps tomorrow's hunger at bay.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

And even if the praise is deserved, it cannot add anything to the philosopher’s feelings: he measures happiness not by popularity, but by the true voice of his own conscience.

Suffering is the nature of this world. It is the golden standard by which all things are measured. It is not happiness that sets the bar, but agony. Even happiness cannot be fully recognized without the right measure of misery to contrast its borders. Suffering magnifies hunger-exhaustion-prods you to move when prosperity is just a dream out of reach. It is the mortal twin of eternal hope. How you respond to its touch molds you, shapes your future as it rains down oppression like fire over your shoulders. Deception. It laid over my world like a bruise. Covered it so completely I bought the lie that the shadow offered and found comfort nestled in its thorny arms. I walked the trail it dusted with breadcrumb, walked in the slip noose it had skillfully wove and dove off the cliff without realizing- willingly, with vigor. Heartbreak. There is no bigger void, no darker shade of soot- no ache more unstoppable than that of a broken heart. A heart in pieces can very much kill you-without love’s healing touch, you will surely die. They say time heals all wounds. They lied.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me. We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak. My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision.... it is unequal to measure itself. It provokes me forever, It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough.... why don’t you let it out then? Come now I will not be tantalized.... you conceive too much of articulation. Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded? Waiting in gloom protected by frost, The dirt receding before my prophetical screams, I underlying causes to balance them at last, My knowledge my live parts.... it keeping tally with the meaning of things, Happiness.... which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.

What is consciousness?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he replied, after a little hesitation. “Never mind,” I said. “Let’s think of something easier. What is energy?” “Well,” he said, “we can measure it and write down the equations governing its conservation.” “Yes, I know, but that was not my question. My question was: what is it?” “We don’t know,” he said with a grin, “and I think you were aware of that.” “Yes, like you I have read Feynman and he says that no one knows what energy is. That brings me to my main point. Would I be right in thinking that you were about to dismiss me (and my belief in God) if I failed to explain the divine and human nature of Christ?” He grinned again, and said nothing. I went on: “Well, by the same token, would you be happy if I now dismiss you and all your knowledge of physics because you cannot explain to me the nature of energy? After all, energy is surely by definition much less complex than the God who created it?” “Please don’t!” he said. “No, I am not going to do that, but I am going to put another question to you: why do you believe in the concepts of consciousness and energy, even though you do not understand them fully? Is it not because of the explanatory power of those concepts?” “I see what you are driving at,” he replied. “You believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man because that is the only explanation that has the power to make sense of what we know of him?” “Exactly.

The heart’s reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” Carl Jung I

When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. But should the same infant die, would you measure the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the seesaw, joy cannot budget it.

The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged, is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy; the miser deliberately starves himself to death; the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm; and the lawyer sheds tears of admiration over "Coke upon Littleton." It is the same through life. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he maybe wise, cannot be a very happy man.

It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large. Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them. I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper. I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary. [Part 2] I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

Glossa Time goes by, time comes along, All is old and all is new; What is right and what is wrong, You must think and ask of you; Have no hope and have no fear, Waves that rise can never hold; If they urge or if they cheer, You remain aloof and cold. To our sight a lot will glisten, Many sounds will reach our ear; Who could take the time to listen And remember all we hear? Keep aside from all that patter, Seek yourself, far from the throng When with loud and idle clatter Time goes by, time comes along. Nor forget the tongue of reason Or its even scales depress When the moment, changing season, Wears the mask of happiness - It is born of reason's slumber And may last a wink as true: For the one who knows its number All is old and all is new. Be as to a play, spectator, As the world unfolds before: You will know the heart of matter Should they act two parts or four; When they cry or tear asunder From your seat enjoy along And you'll learn from art to wonder What is right and what is wrong. Past and future, ever blending, Are the twin sides of same page: New start will begin with ending When you know to learn from age; All that was or be tomorrow We have in the present, too; But what's vain and futile sorrow You must think and ask of you; For the living cannot sever From the means we've always had: Now, as years ago, and ever, Men are happy or are sad: Other masks, same play repeated; Diff'rent tongues, same words to hear; Of your dreams so often cheated, Have no hope and have no fear. Hope not when the villains cluster By success and glory drawn: Fools with perfect lack of luster Will outshine Hyperion! Fear it not, they'll push each other To reach higher in the fold, Do not side with them as brother, Waves that rise can never hold. Sounds of siren songs call steady Toward golden nets, astray; Life attracts you into eddies To change actors in the play; Steal aside from crowd and bustle, Do not look, seem not to hear From your path, away from hustle, If they urge or if they cheer; If they reach for you, go faster, Hold your tongue when slanders yell; Your advice they cannot master, Don't you know their measure well? Let them talk and let them chatter, Let all go past, young and old; Unattached to man or matter, You remain aloof and cold. You remain aloof and cold If they urge or if they cheer; Waves that rise can never hold, Have no hope and have no fear; You must think and ask of you What is right and what is wrong; All is old and all is new, Time goes by, time comes along.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. — Carl Jung

As you trust Him, seek and follow His will, you will receive blessings that your finite mind cannot understand here on earth. Your Father in Heaven and His Holy Son know better than you what brings happiness. They have given you the plan of happiness. As you understand and follow it, happiness will be your blessing. As you willingly obey, receive, and honor the ordinances and covenants of that holy plan, you can have the greatest measure of satisfaction in this life. Yes, even times of overpowering happiness. You will prepare yourself for an eternity of glorious life with your loved ones who qualify for that kingdom.

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,—few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in one's arms,—God made tangible,—what bliss! The heart, that obscure, celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there, uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul. One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of shadows.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” Carl Jung

Suffering is the nature of this world. It is the golden standard by which all things are measured. It is not happiness that sets the bar, but agony. Even happiness cannot be fully recognized without the right measure of misery to contrast its borders. Suffering magnifies hunger—exhaustion—prods you to move when prosperity is just a dream out of reach. It is the mortal twin of eternal hope. How you respond to its touch molds you, shapes your future as it rains down oppression like fire over your shoulders.

The moments of refinement conceal a death-principle: nothing is more fragile than subtlety. The abuse of it leads to the catechisms, an end to dialectical games, the collapse of an intellect which instinct no longer assists. The ancient philosophy, trapped in its scruples, had in spite of itself opened the way to the artlessness of the lower depths; religious sects pullulated; the schools gave way to the cults. An analogous defeat threatens us: already the ideologies are rampant, the degraded mythologies which will reduce and annihilate us. We shall not be able to sustain the ceremony of our contradictions much longer. Many are prepared to venerate any idol, to serve any truth, so long as one and the other be imposed upon them, so long as they need not make the effort to choose their shame or their disaster. Whatever the world to come, the Western peoples will play in it the part of the Graeculi in the Roman Empire. Sought out and despised by the new conqueror, they will have, in order to impress him, only the jugglery of their intelligence or the luster of their past. The art of surviving oneself—they are already distinguished in that. Symptoms of exhaustion are everywhere: Germany has given her measure in music: what leads us to believe that she will excel in it again? She has used up the resources of her profundity, as France those of her elegance. Both—and with them, this entire corner of the world—are on the verge of bankruptcy, the most glamorous since antiquity. Then will come the liquidation: a prospect which is not a negligible one, a respite whose duration cannot be estimated, a period of facility in which each man, before the deliverance finally at hand, will be happy to have behind him the throes of hope and expectation.

God made man’s heart for Himself and it cannot be happy if God is not in the first place. It is sufficient for each person to ask himself what influences his concrete decisions in order to know what place God has in his life. When God becomes the measure of all decisions and of every action, then it is possible to speak about God being in the first place.

Music escapes ideological characterization. Just as there are some social scientists who believe that what cannot be measured does not truly exist, and some psychologists used to believe that consciousness does not exist because it cannot be observed by instruments, so ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged. When I was a student, I lived with a hard-line dialectical materialist who said that Schubert was a typical petit bourgeois pessimist, whose music would die out once objective causes for pessimism ceased to exist. But I suspect that even he was not entirely happy with this formulation.

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

And while [we] do have possibilities that are vast and magnificent and almost infinite in scope, it's important to remember that our choice-rich lives have the potential to breed their own brand of trouble. We are susceptible to emotional uncertainties and neuroses that are probably not very common among the Hmong, but that run rampant these days among my contemporaries in, say, Baltimore. The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice...Equally disquieting are the times when we do make a choice, only to later feel as though we have murdered some other aspect of our being by settling on one single concrete decision. By choosing Door Number Three, we fear we have killed off a different -- but equally critical piece of our soul that could only have been made manifest by walking through Door Number One or Door Number Two. ...Two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. Compulsive comparing, of course, only leads to debilitating causes of "life envy": the certainty that somebody else is much luckier than you, and that if only you had her body, her husband, her children, her job, everything would be easy and wonderful and happy. All these choices and all this longing can create a weird kind of haunting in our lives - as though the ghosts of all our other, unchosen, possibilities linger forever in a shadow world around us, continuously asking, "Are you certain this is what you really wanted?" And nowhere does that question risk haunting us more than in our marriages, precisely because the emotional stakes of that most intensely personal choice have become so huge.

In our opinion, there is no public good other than one that assures the citizens' private good; we judge institutions from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals. But neither do we confuse the idea of private interest with happiness[...]. We cannot really know what the word 'happiness' means, and still less what authentic values it covers; there is no way to measure the happiness of others, and it is always easy to call a situation that one would like to impose on others happy: in particular, we declare happy those condemned to stagnation, under the pretext that happiness is immobility.

Here, where an immense country lies about me, over which the winds pass coming from the seas, here I feel that no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings that deep within them have a life of their own; for even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things. But I believe nevertheless that you will not have to remain without a solution if you will hold to objects that are similar to those from which my eyes now draw refreshment. If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it—but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction, to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates, --few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake -- let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self.

THE TECHNOSPHERE DOESN’T particularly care whether you live or die, or whether you are happy or miserable. Its goal is to control you and to make you serve its purposes, which are to grow, to control everything and to dominate the biosphere. How it achieves this control is a matter of what is most efficient. If you are one of its faithful servants, then the best way to make you do your job well is to incentivize you—to give you high status, ample pay and lots of perks. But if you are a lowly menial grunt in its service who, unfortunately, cannot yet be replaced by a shiny new robot, then low pay and low status suffice, and destroying your autonomy and self-reliance while fostering your dependency is the key to making you perform. If you are a technologically useless person but harmless—an artist, a philosopher, writer, poet, free thinker—then the technosphere simply can’t see you, because what you do is not measurable in units the technosphere can understand. But if your thinking turns out to be dangerous or harmful to the techno-sphere—because you are someone who tries to break the chains of dependency and to find ways to live outside of the technosphere, or to undermine it in some other way—then it will consider you as nothing less than a terrorist!

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers, and better or worse ways to put them to use. Take child rearing as an example: How can we keep children free from disease? How can we raise them to be happy and responsible members of society? There are undoubtedly both good and bad answers to questions of this sort, and not all belief systems and cultural practices will be equally suited to bringing the good ones to light. This is not to say that there will always be only one right answer to every question, or a single, best way to reach every specific goal. But given the inescapable specificity of our world, the range of optimal solutions to any problem will generally be quite limited. While there might not be one best food to eat, we cannot eat stones—and any culture that would make stone eating a virtue, or a religious precept, will suffer mightily for want of nourishment (and teeth). It is inevitable, therefore, that some approaches to politics, economics, science, and even spirituality and ethics will be objectively better than their competitors (by any measure of “better” we might wish to adopt), and gradations here will translate into very real differences in human happiness.

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cog- nizance. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it--but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth, where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us, and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return, sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which this angel gravitates,—few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed.

Wittgenstein uses this beetle analogy to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in a person’s mind; things like smell, pain, love, happiness, sadness, and so on are things that no one can communicate sufficiently enough to share and reveal their experiences to others. I can never see your beetle, and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the beetle, though, the word has to be a word that everyone understands and can be taught for the word to have any meaning. According to Wittgenstein and many others, language is entirely social. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument, which proposes that no language can be understandable if it is solely to one individual. Rather, language is only formed through shared use amongst a community of others. Thus, the sensation of something might exist exclusively to one’s self, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. Meaning, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we experience it, even if everyone talks about it in the same words. We can only assume. Arguably, trying to rationalize, communicate, and comprehend the mental experience of a sensation as it actually is, becomes inconceivable after a certain point. For example, one could say that fresh cut grass smells good, but when asked what it smells like, they would have to go on to say things like it smells natural or like the season of spring. If then asked, what that smells like, perhaps if one tried hard enough, they could come with a few other smells to compare it to, but they would eventually and inevitably reach the limits of language. There would be a final question of what it smells like that would have no answer. A sensation beyond words that no one besides the smeller could know for sure what is like. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein writes when referring to the notion of subjective experience and that which exceeds language and logical understanding. Beyond the suggestions of language and shared meaning, arguably what is most thought-provoking about all of this is the notion that we can never know what it feels like to be anyone else other than our self. We can never know what the world might look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like from outside our own heads. We can never verify what anyone else’s color blue looks like, or what anyone else’s punch in the arm feels like, or what anyone else’s sense of love or happiness is like. We are all locked inside our minds, yelling out to each other in an attempt to find out, but never capable of entering anyone else’s to find out for sure. Even if the framework, structure, and wiring of each of our brains are mostly identical, the unknowable conscious psychological layer on top of it all transmutes the experience of neurological occurrences into something abstract, distanced enough from the measurable and communicable to ever know exactly what any of it is, where it comes from, and how it might change in different heads. Ultimately, no matter the philosophical stance or scientific theory, it is fair to argue that at a minimum no one can or will ever know what it means to have navigated and experienced this universe in the way that you have and will. Each moment that you experience, a particular sense or image of the world with your particular conditions of consciousness, is forever yours exclusively, withholding the mystery of what it means to actually be you for all of eternity. Perhaps we all feel and experience in nearly identical ways, or perhaps we all feel and experience in very dissimilar ways. Your version of blue, your sensation of pain, your experience of love, could perhaps be its only version of blue, its only version of pain, and its only version of love to ever exist in the entire universe. The point is, we don’t know because each of us holds the answer that no one can ever access.

One must bear in mind, that those who have the true modern spirit need not modernise, just as those who are truly brave are not braggarts. Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans; or in the hideous structures, where their children are interned when they take their lessons; or in the square houses with flat straight wall-surfaces, pierced with parallel lines of windows, where these people are caged in their lifetime; certainly modernism is not in their ladies' bonnets, carrying on them loads of incongruities. These are not modern, but merely European. True modernism is freedom of mind, not slavery of taste. It is independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European schoolmasters. It is science, but not its wrong application in life,—a mere imitation of our science teachers who reduce it into a superstition absurdly invoking its aid for all impossible purposes. Science, when it oversteps its limits and occupies the whole region of life, has its fascination. It looks so powerful because of its superficiality,—as does a hippopotamus which is very little else but physical. Science speaks of the struggle for existence, but forgets that man's existence is not merely of the surface. Man truly exists in the ideal of perfection, whose depth and height are not yet measured. Life based upon science is attractive to some men, because it has all the characteristics of sport; it feigns seriousness, but is not profound. When you go a-hunting, the less pity you have the better; for your one object is to chase the game and kill it, to feel that you are the greater animal, that your method of destruction is thorough and scientific. Because, therefore, a sportsman is only a superficial man,—his fullness of humanity not being there to hamper him,—he is successful in killing innocent life and is happy. And the life of science is that superficial life. It pursues success with skill and thoroughness, and takes no account of the higher nature of man. But even science cannot tow humanity against truth and be successful; and those whose minds are crude enough to plan their lives upon the supposition, that man is merely a hunter and his paradise the paradise of sportsman, will be rudely awakened in the midst of their trophies of skeletons and skulls.

the rebels of 1905, at the frontier on which they stand united, teach us, to the sound of exploding bombs, that rebellion cannot lead, without ceasing to be rebellion, to consolation and to the comforts of dogma. Their only evident victory is to triumph at least over solitude and negation. In the midst of a world which they deny and which rejects them, they try, man after man, like all the great-hearted ones, to reconstruct a brotherhood of man. The love they bear for one another, which brings them happiness even in the desert of a prison, which extends to the great mass of their enslaved and silent fellow men, gives the measure of their distress and of their hopes. To serve this love, they must first kill; to inaugurate the reign of innocence, they must accept a certain culpability. This contradiction will be resolved for them only at the very last moment. Solitude and chivalry, renunciation and hope will only be surmounted by the willing acceptance of death.

am full beyond words. And as is usual with me, I wept just a little. It’s silly weak, kiddish and all that, but, gee, to have done something real … One can if one will. Now I know it. We measure by material accomplishments, that is, in the eyes of society.… I think I am registering a comeback, to employ the vernacular. Now to burst into print and to begin—not to shine—but to show phosphorescent tendencies that may assemble into a little glow. Big fires from little sparks grow. You’re with me, dad’s with me; and there are many I rather feel will jump on top when my bus gets going. I have youth; I am acquiring faith, i.e. courage, confidence, right’s might: I am learning every day and developing every hour.… Fool that I am, I’d like to cry for a week, just from sheer happiness.… This year I am sure is the most glorious in my college so far after all.—If only I could find a girl, now. That is a big problem for me to thrash out—and it must be for myself, by myself, and with no other source or guide, less perchance it be Experience. I have so long avoided and put off telling this to you: but you must see it. After Emma, I have lost faith in your sex. That affair you never knew in detail. I can tell you of it some day, but not here and now.… Why I write this, I cannot say. I don’t know. But as I see engagements about me by the score—not that I think it even tolerable in one so young—but because I realize that I of equal age (in years) do not feel the slightest attraction or inclination to … (page missing)

Happiness is the only fortune that is so valuable, it cannot be measured.

I am younger today than I was at twenty-five. Of course the furrows of suffering have been dug deeper, but so have those of understanding sympathy and inner happiness. Whatever age may do to my earthly shell, I shall never grow cynical or indifferent—and one cannot measure the reserve power locked up in that assurance.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Work without pleasure will cause pressure that cannot be measured.

Even happiness cannot be fully recognized without the right measure of misery to contrast its borders. Suffering magnifies hunger—exhaustion—prods you to move when prosperity is just a dream out of reach. It is the mortal twin of eternal hope. How you respond to its touch molds you, shapes your future as it rains down oppression like fire over your shoulders.

Your potential has no boundaries; it cannot be measured or understood by human intelligence.

April 22 MORNING “Him hath God exalted.” — Acts 5:31 JESUS, our Lord, once crucified, dead and buried, now sits upon the throne of glory. The highest place that heaven affords is His by undisputed right. It is sweet to remember that the exaltation of Christ in heaven is a representative exaltation. He is exalted at the Father’s right hand, and though as Jehovah He has eminent glories, in which finite creatures cannot share, yet as the Mediator, the honours which Jesus wears in heaven are the heritage of all the saints. It is delightful to reflect how close is Christ’s union with His people. We are actually one with Him; we are members of His body; and His exaltation is our exaltation. He will give us to sit upon His throne, even as He has overcome, and is set down with His Father on His throne; He has a crown, and He gives us crowns too; He has a throne, but He is not content with having a throne to Himself, on His right hand there must be His queen, arrayed in “gold of Ophir.” He cannot be glorified without His bride. Look up, believer, to Jesus now; let the eye of your faith behold Him with many crowns upon His head; and remember that you will one day be like Him, when you shall see Him as He is; you shall not be so great as He is, you shall not be so divine, but still you shall, in a measure, share the same honours, and enjoy the same happiness and the same dignity which He possesses. Be content to live unknown for a little while, and to walk your weary way through the fields of poverty, or up the hills of affliction; for by-and-by you shall reign with Christ, for He has “made us kings and priests unto God, and we shall reign for ever and ever.” Oh!, wonderful thought for the children of God! We have Christ for our glorious representative in heaven’s courts now, and soon He will come and receive us to Himself, to be with Him there, to behold His glory, and to share His joy.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.  It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” ~ Carl Jung

Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering. In the words of Carl Jung: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The Tao Te Ching extends the metaphor: “Difficult and easy accomplish each other, long and short form each other, high and low distinguish each other.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

GODMAN QUOTES 9 ***Testament of time*** Do not waste the time you cannot bring back. What you have done to be a waste is what you have wasted your effort on. Time is paramount in every periodic factor. You can’t afford to mend the time you could not afford to fix. Odd time is useful in another space…know this and know peace. Work you have done to save your time is the time you have gained by good work. Quit excuses and you will find a better excuse. He who doesn’t know the importance of time doesn’t know his worse enemy. Time factor judges other factor at the end of all projects. Demand time in every work and you will be able to measure the work with precise duration.

I’ve fallen into the thought process of “I’ll be happy when I’m a size _____.” This is shallow and untrue. We cannot find our self-worth or happiness in our size. There is no such thing as a “size happy.” Large or small, Jesus loves us all. Friend, please stop looking for your validation in the mirror or on a scale. Your identity cannot be found there no matter how long you stare. Your worth cannot be found on the tag inside your jeans or leggings. Your beauty cannot be measured. Your appearance does not define you. Your identity is found in something that no one but God can truly see. Check out what God said when the prophet Samuel saw David’s impressive elder brother and thought Eliab must be the man God had chosen to be king: The LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7) God looks at the heart. Your weight will fluctuate, your body will change, but his love for you remains the same. Your body is a vessel. It’s a tool. It does not determine your value. Only Christ can do that. Your body is not an object for others to look at for pleasure. Your identity is safely hidden in God’s care. The apostle Paul said it this way: “You died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3 NLT). No amount of Photoshop can change who we are in Christ. It’s time to remove the filters we hide behind and allow God to reveal our identity in him.

Although wealth, physical health and social equality may all make their contributions to human happiness, they can all do little and cannot themselves be secured, without health in the individual mind. We are our own kingdoms and make for ourselves, in large measure, the world in which we live. We may be rich, and healthy, and liberal; but unless we are free from secret guilt, the agonies of inferiority and frustration, and the fire of unexpressed aggression, all other things are added to our lives in vain. The cruelty and irrationality of human society spring from these secret sources. The savagery of a Hitler, the brutality of a Stalin, the ruthlessness and refined bestiality that is rampant in the world today – persecution, cruelty and war – are nothing but the external expression, the institutional and rationalized form, of these dark forces in the human heart.

I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all of the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being—they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.12 These ideas grow out of

Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order. After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.) The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.

As a society, we pursue happiness and become measurably less happy over time. We privilege autonomy, and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, and more spied on than any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology, and discover that the average working day is longer than ever, and that we have less time than we had before. The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our ends should be, or whether there is purpose in anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial markets in order to avoid any future crash: they promptly crash. We are so eager that all scientific research result in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is a truly significant advance in scientific thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of study in the humanities as utilitarian, in order to get value for money, and thus render it pointless and, in this form, certainly a waste of resource. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricula and focussing on exam results to the point where free-thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged; in our universities many students are, in any case, so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussions that threaten to examine the model critically; and their teachers, who should know better, in a serious dereliction of duty, collude. We over-sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection; we over-use antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria that no antibiotic can kill; we make drugs illegal to protect society, and, while failing comprehensively to control the use of drugs, create a fertile field for crime; we protect children in such a way that they cannot cope with – let alone relish – uncertainty or risk, and are rendered vulnerable. The left hemisphere’s motivation is control; and its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could see only one of the arrows in a vastly complex network of interactions

Why America Exists When oppression became unbearable, America was born - when discrimination turned extreme, America was born - when rigidity became intolerable, America was born. America was born of an unbending desire for freedom - America was born of a drive for self-correction - America was born of an urge for progression. Yes we did many mistakes in the process, even committed horrible atrocities - we drove people off their lands to build a new world for our children - and nothing that we can do today can mend those atrocities of yesterday, but what we can do is to make a promise to ourselves to never repeat those atrocities of our ancestors no more. It's time we become the new Americans - Americans with more accountability than recklessness - Americans with more curiosity than rigidity - Americans with more acceptability than prejudice - Americans with more inclusivity than discrimination. There is no our America and their America, there's only one America - the United States of America. You see, ours is not just the United States of America, ours is the United States of Assimilation. And we must practice this principle to the letter and spirit everyday of our lives. For example, we of all people cannot in right mind deny shelter to those seeking refuge, especially when we are both sociologically and economically capable of doing so. Whoever comes to these shores of liberty, in the hope of life, freedom and happiness, automatically becomes an American, by measure of the same determination and will that made our founding fathers set foot on Plymouth Rock escaping British bigotry, snobbery and barbarism. Our very country is founded by immigrants. America was built by refugees, and as such, if this land can't be a refuge for the subjugated and persecuted, then it is an insult on our very existence as the great land of the free and brave.