On Happiness (incl Suicide and Meaning of Life)
“Happiness is found in the doing, not merely possessing.” – Napoleon Hill
THINK: Alan Watts, sailing boats, discipline, arts, skill
“Life is most skillfully lived when one sails a boat rather than rowing it. It’s more intelligent to sail than to row. With oars I have to use my muscles and my effort to drag myself along the water. But with a sail, I let the wind do the work for me.” — Alan Watts
“Money doesn’t buy pleasure. Ever. Look, if you want to get stoned drunk, and go out and get a bottle of bourbon and down it you can’t do that except for people who have practiced the distillers art. You can’t even make love without art. Where I live in Sausalito, we have a harbor full of ever so many pleasure craft, motor cruises sailing boats all kinds of things and they never leave the dock. All that happens with them is their owners have cocktail parties there on Saturdays and Sundays, because they discovered having bought these things that the discipline of sailing is difficult to learn and takes a lot of time. And they didn’t have time for it so they just bought the thing as a status symbol. So in other words you can’t have pleasure in life without skill. But it isn’t a unpleasant task to learn a skill.” – Alan Watts ~ https://alanwatts.org/1-5-12-spiritual-alchemy/?highlight=skill
“It is very simple to be happy. But it is very difficult to be simple.” – Rabindranath Tagore
SEE: skill, discipline, arts, simplicity, Colin Chapman lightness
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy. – Virginia Woolf
From 2020 W39+ …
Einzelgänger: When Life is Meaningless (And Why We Feel Worthless)
Purpose is an illusion created by mind, to shield ourselves from the possibly life is inherently pointless
Happiness is a virtue, not a reward. – Baruch Spinoza
Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them. – Baruch Spinoza
Life is just a party, and parties weren’t meant to last. – 1999
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life – Camus
There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide – Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Fuller describes the experience in Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), “Apparently addressing myself, I said ‘You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others. You and all men are here for the sake of other men.” - R Buckminster Fuller - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/r-buckminster-fuller