Daniel G. Brinton

“ Again I repeat that the chief end of man is the symmetrical development of all his powers and faculties and the enjoyment which he will derive from their activity, and not at all the exclusive or preponderant attention to one or the other element of his nature. His moral sense is merely the guide of the duties he owes to others, duties indispensable to his own life and liberty, but by no means exhaustive of his nature; rather, merely giving him the opportunity for the higher aim of developing himself. The moral life is but a means to an end, and not an end in itself. ”

“ We can always explain our merriment, but often not our melancholy. Glee is concrete and affirmative; dejection is vague and negative; and the negative is unlimited.
The drama of life is a tragedy, for its last scene is always that of the death of the title-role. We take the greatest interest in the spectacle, but rarely care to remember the denouement.
If you love life so much, why complain of ennui? There is nothing like it for lengthening the hours, and thus giving you longer to live.
The more pleasant the moments, the swifter they fly. Perfect happiness would destroy Time. ”

“ If we do not recall to mind and think over what we read we lose most of the pleasure and all the profit of the action. This was what the English philosopher Hobbes meant when he said,—“If I had read as many books as some men, I should be as ignorant as they.” To read without reflecting is like buying grain for food and never grinding it. Through reflection on the images, incidents, and forms of expression with which reading has stored the memory, the highest enjoyment from the process is secured. ”

“ Such considerations as these, drawn from the unalterable laws of nature and life, show how short is the sight of those who look upon happiness as the uninterrupted continuance of pleasurable sensations, or would seek it in a ceaseless round of gayety. Far clearer was the vision of Pindar when he exclaimed, with the inspiration of a poet,—“Beneath every true pleasure hides the sense of a past pain.” The dark background of sorrow can alone give full relief to the bright figure of joy. Grief is a part of gladness, and that life is not happy which has no unhappiness. ”

“ Every soul knows, unconsciously and instinctively, that sorrow is the only teacher of what is most valuable in life. Pg 276 It alone develops fortitude, and therefore it commands the respect of all; it alone teaches sympathy, and therefore it enlists the admiration of all. No character is ripe which has not crispened under its sharp breath; none is of finest temper but those forged by its heavy blows. The noblest lives are sad; but those who have quaffed the severe joy of sorrow care little for the light froth of pleasure. ”

“ La fatale donna di bellezza, “the fatal gift of beauty,” says the proverb of the Italians. Perilous is the path of mortals who walk too near the gods. The brightest beacons are those which most attract the foul birds of night. The men or the women who shine beyond their fellows through the bounteous gifts of nature are the chosen targets for envy and hatred and calumny and all their ugly crew. In the clash of violent emotions excited by the radiance of fair faces, in the contention of love and jealousy, despair and passion, it is rare that the cause of it all escapes scot free. ”

“ The quality of high energy is developed only by affliction. Wrestling with it, the sinews of the mind are trained. We must go forth and seek new supports in life, when we have lost those which we loved and depended upon. By such an effort, we reconcile ourselves to the loss, gain a victory over fate, strengthen our minds, and reach an air of wider freedom. The blast may beat at the gate, but all is quiet within. There is a habit of sadness which is not gloomy, which may share and admire the delights of life, but which is ever ready to meet the storms of misfortune with serenity and fortitude. ”

“ Whenever, Pg 54 without ulterior aim and for its own sake, we give ourselves up to the admiration of some grand scene in nature or masterful production of human art, we feel and recognize how near to us, how much a part of us, is that invisible and ideal world in which are set up the goals of man’s noblest aspirations. To unite these opposites, to illuminate the pleasures of sense with the light of the ideal, and, on the other hand, to capture its evanescent rays by entangling them in material enjoyments, is the final precept of the Art of Happiness. ”

“ To be “void of strong desire,” set free from hope and fear, snugly harbored from all storms of feeling, so far from being the condition of the sage, is the aspiration of the fool. Keen sensations awaken the sentiments, emotions fertilize the intellect, passions educate the reason. The brute goes through life without a smile or a tear; man’s proud privilege is to weep and to laugh.
The ancients taught that philosophical happiness is to want little, and that it is the error of the vulgar to want much and to enjoy many things. ”

“ For if people cannot assign pleasures to others, is it not an impertinence to offer instruction on the subject? Can anybody tell me better than myself what I like and what I desire?
True, but the difference is wide between telling me what things should please me, and telling me how I can best please myself; and the latter is the aim of right instruction in this matter. That it is badly needed, one who runs may read. Most people pursue unhappiness more steadily than happiness. Only fools find life an easy thing; to the wise it is a perpetual surprise that they get along at all. ”

“ Who would wish to escape suffering himself, when suffering makes up so large a part of the experiences of his fellow men? Who would seek by any base flight to avoid Sorrow, when Sorrow alone can teach him the highest meaning of Life?
History is ever ready to point out how nations have been benefited by calamities, and churches by persecutions. Why not believe that the same rule holds good in our own lives?
Think what we should miss if all went smoothly with us! Without pain, we should not know pity; without danger, we should not develop courage ”

“ Pg 20 But we hold it needless and unwise to leave any sunny field uncultured on whose soil may be trained to bloom the fragrant flower of pleasure.
The yearning for joy is a cry of nature which can never be stifled. Give heed to it and obey it. It calls you to wider horizons, to warmer sympathies, to a fuller growth, to a completer development. It holds the secret of Evolution. It is the incessant prompter to a higher form of existence. ”

“ The blacker the shadow, the brighter is the light that casts it. In all pleasurable feelings there must be the alternations from exercise to remission and repose; and in proportion as such feelings are keen, will pain take the place of simple exhaustion. When the waves of emotion are but ripples on the surface of life, stirred by the zephyrs of light desires, the remission will be but a passing sense of fatigue ”

“ Fortunately, if evils are many, so are the sources of consolation. We may seek them in ourselves, from others, or from a correct comprehension of the laws of nature; and when these prove inadequate, we may still win the victory, by discovering that Sorrow itself is not an enemy but a friend, a veiled and ghostly guide, who leads us, as the spirit of Virgil led Dante, and as only Sorrow can lead, through the realms of gloom and woe to undreamed-of fields of serenity and light. ”

“ Society is the jury impaneled to try the causes of which the law takes no cognizance.
The worst of an unfounded accusation is its foundation.
Never hit at a hornet unless you are sure of killing it. Never notice a social scandal about yourself unless you can refute it absolutely. A weak defense is more damaging than silence.
It is a much admired art to turn the weaknesses of others to our own profit. How sublime would be the science which would direct their strength to their own true interests! ”

“ Only cramped bigots and dull pedants cheapen the value of beauty.
Beauty is real; it is that which alone is permanent and visible; it lurks behind a thousand masks and distorted countenances, ever struggling to body itself forth; it is the manifestation of potent and mysterious natural laws, which but for it would remain forever hidden from us. Its proud power is to awaken Love with all her joyous train; and Love means the unconscious attraction of the Ideal, the noblest incitement to human endeavor. ”

“ The advocates of all such attacks on personal liberty—be they priests or social dreamers—are not less opposed to free thought than to free action. The defense of their opinions, not the discovery of truth, is to them the purpose of research. The logical ultimatum of the one is the stake, of the other the dynamite bomb. Both would restrict the untrammeled and unbiased pursuit of knowledge.
Knowledge, however, is the twin brother of liberty and the provider for the treasury of happiness. Much more than a fine phrase is the poet’s line, that “He is a freeman, whom the truth makes free.” ”

“ There is an advantage in the multiplicity of miseries. One deep vexation is often more fatal to happiness than several. It becomes a fixed idea, monopolizes the mind, and is more dangerous to its health, than when one is obliged “to take up arms against a sea of troubles.” Regret not, therefore, when clouds darken all the horizon; better this, than the single sky-specter, in whose bosom is the whirlwind, and on whose path follows destruction. ”

“ Pg 260 When the world seems a desert to you and life a blank, reflect whether you have not had just such feelings before, and overlived them to enjoy happy days and smiling seasons.
Seek sympathy for your losses from a woman, for your failures from a man. A woman will not understand why you tried, if you failed.
Half of happiness is the recognition that we are happy; and half of misery is the forgetting how many causes of happiness we have. ”

“ The finest fruit of the culture of the esthetic emotions, culled from their sunniest sides and served as “human nature’s daily food,” is what we call “good taste.” What an admirable faculty! It is the best of good sense, and walks hand in hand with good manners and good morals. It prunes away exaggerations and affectations, it erases superlatives, it modifies antipathies, and lessens prejudices. The modest home lighted by its fairy lamp shines with a radiance that the luxury of the vulgar plutocrat can never approach. ”

“ In this race for riches, whether along the peaceful avenue of economy or jostling in the streets of speculation, where comes in the Pursuit of Happiness? Riches, as I have shown, are and can be nothing more than means to this end, and those who, through avarice, greed, or rapacity, make them the end and aim of their aspirations, trade gold for dross. Scarcely less is the error of those who are ever postponing the hour of enjoyment until a certain sum is reached, and their fortune can be rounded off with additional thousands. ”

“ Those who condemn the pursuit of Happiness reveal the baseness of their own conception of it.
The doctrine that we should get rid of our wants by extinguishing our desires is suited to the clown in the story, who cut off his ears because they were cold.
Self-realization is widely different from self-manifestation.
An error that persuades us we are happy is more welcome than a truth which shows us we are not.
Life is a sphere with an infinite number of sides; but, like the terrestrial globe, to each individual it seems a plain, bounded by his own horizon, with himself in its center. ”

“ At no period of the year are they out of season, age does not wither them, nor does “custom stale their infinite variety.” They are social or solitary as we choose to make them, and they know no sense of satiety, as with them the appetite grows by what it feeds on. They flatter our self-complacency by showing us that we are growing wiser, and they stir within us sympathy and appreciation for others. They are always at hand, for the appreciative student carries between the covers of his Shakespeare more pleasure than the millionaire can stow in his yacht. ”

“ How much better to live one’s own life, to be oneself, to cultivate what abilities we have rather than to waste time on those we have not, to learn the limits of our own capacities and insure success by working within them! The advice of the sages of all times has been to swear by the words of no teacher, to call no man Master, to think our own thoughts, to be true to ourselves, to make our own felicity, and not to run about the world trying to share that of others by aping their sentiments and actions. ”

“ In the iridescent glow of this master-passion its object never seems a mere human being, a man or a woman, but is invested with a charm unseen by the eye, not expressed in form or color, endowed with the power of exciting the soul to an indefinite and passionate expansion. It is the inaudible appeal of unborn posterity for its share in the world of Being. ”

“ Beyond all things, a girl’s education should be directed toward manual training and exercises of the understanding; instead of that, she is taught the fine arts and regaled with poetry and fiction. Her imagination is fostered by lectures on esthetics, and her memory crammed with moral platitudes which have no place in real life; while the principles of business and the maintenance of her own rights are left out of her training. I cannot but attribute to this the most common and fatal defect of the female mind,—its lack of the sense of abstract justice. ”

“ But the thoughtful man will recognize in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife, the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to think of it! ”

“ Not only are the two compatible; they are inseparable; as the sage Rasselas said to the Princess: “It is our business to consider what beings like us may perform; each laboring for his own happiness by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others.”
All agree that we should strive for the happiness of others; it has even been said that this is the only moral justification of any act of our lives. But the cup which we are to proffer to all, we are, forsooth, forbidden to taste ourselves! What is good for everybody else is bad for oneself! ”

“ Confidence in one’s powers, the thought of the prize to be won, the love of glory and reputation, a knowledge of the means at our disposal, and a faith in fortune are the considerations which strengthen courage, and if they are marshaled in battle array and led by Enthusiasm, the fears which hovered over our path will be routed like flocks of evil-boding birds.
An easier though less noble escape from fear is Apathy. ”

“ Its lesson to the individual is, that he is neither the helpless creature of necessity nor the slave of chance; that he is master of his immediate action, but of its consequences he is not master; that there are unseen forces at work arranging the incidents and accidents of his life, and these forces he can in no wise control; but if he is alert and diligent they cannot entangle his own individuality in the mesh of events, he can rise superior to them, can be himself, and win happiness to some degree in any surroundings ”

“ The man who aims to be himself will wish others to remain themselves, and will be the last to obtrude his personality in a disagreeable way upon them. Obedience, voluntary subjection to the will of others, is part of his self-training. He who cannot obey, cannot command. Nor is he one who lives for himself, is solitary or selfish. The characters who in history shine with the most marked individuality have been those who moved most actively among their fellow men.
True individuality is that confidence in self which arises from a knowledge of one’s own powers, their extent and their limitations. ”

“ Under this baleful doctrine nations have become misshapen in mind, atrophied in culture, distorted from honest nature’s rule, mean, miserable, and inefficient. Yet this same doctrine is preached to-day from thousands of pulpits in lands of highest civilization. Is it not time for the common sense of most to rise in protest against such a survival from the Dark Ages of the life of the race? Reason blushes only for pleasures which she cannot explain, and he who acquaints himself with the whole nature of man knows that all his powers and faculties have their appropriate use. ”

“ Pain softens into pleasure as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into the brighter.... Made as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition, something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient in order that the materials may turn to as fine an account as possible. The loss of children seems to be one of those necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. ”

“ These are the words of Buddha himself:—
“Let no man look for what is pleasant; for not to find it is pain.
“Let no man love anything; for the loss of the beloved is sorrow.
“After pleasure follows grief, and from affection comes fear.
“I have run through many births, and painful it is to be born again and again; but now, O Thou Builder of Pg 22 this house, Thou hast been seen, and not again shalt Thou rebuild it. The mind has attained to the extinction of all desire.”
This is the ideal of happiness that four hundred millions of human beings hold before their minds to-day. ”

“ Rejecting the old, putting on the new, the race marches forward to loftier ideals, the milestones of its progress being the wrecks of temples and the ruins of churches. Religions rise and fall and disappear; but Religion grows forever, because it is the inseparable associate, aye, the very expression, of that mysterious impulse on which man’s future development depends, and which makes him part and parcel of the infinite Energy in which he lives and moves and has his being. ”