We are nothing more than will to live and the successive satisfaction of all our volitions is what we think in the conception of happiness.
 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819). copy citation

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Author Arthur Schopenhauer
Source The World as Will and Representation
Topic satisfaction happiness
Date 1819
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40868/40868-h/40868-h.html

Context

“There is only one inborn error, and that is, that we exist in order to be happy. It is inborn in us because it is one with our existence itself, and our whole being is only a paraphrase of it, nay, our body is its monogram. We are nothing more than will to live and the successive satisfaction of all our volitions is what we think in the conception of happiness. As long as we persist in this inborn error, indeed even become rigidly fixed in it through optimistic dogmas, the world appears to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things as in small, we must experience that the world and life are by no means arranged with a view to containing a happy existence.” source