..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.

Maybe happiness is this: not feeling that you should be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

where happiness and happily ever-after doesn't begin at size 0 and end at size 6 and where there are possibilities for love and happiness and professional success and great friends and a wonderful life even if you don't look like one of those girls in the magazines.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.

When, therefore, we maintain that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. For it is not continuous drinkings and revelings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit.

People argue themselves out of their pleasures