Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels.
Interpretation
Happiness is often pursued but can be found in the simple moments of life.
In this quote, Bertolt Brecht highlights the irony of the human pursuit of happiness. Many people actively search for happiness, fixating on distant goals or ideals, all the while overlooking the fact that true happiness is often found in the present moment and in the small, everyday occurrences around them.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding joy in everyday life.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness
I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!
Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
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