If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.
goalquotes
Is it not true that the clever rogue is like the runner who runs well for the first half of the course, but flags before reaching the goal: he is quick off the mark, but ends in disgrace and slinks away crestfallen and uncrowned. The crown is the prize of the really good runner who perseveres to the end.
Good character is the indispensable condition and chief determinant of happiness, itself the goal of all human doing. The end of all action, individual or collective, is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion — in Schiller’s words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. it has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal… an exalted and noble ‘to this end.’ Perish in pursuit of this and only this.
My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.
And so, onwards… along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence.. however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes – into your goal, with nothing left over.
Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen. Few in pursuit of the goal.
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.
