Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance.

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.