To fill the hour──that is happiness.
Interpretation
Happiness comes from how we choose to spend our time.
In this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he suggests that true happiness is derived from how we occupy our time and the activities we choose to engage in. Rather than seeking happiness as an elusive goal, it emphasizes the importance of filling our hours meaningfully, indicating that the moments we create for ourselves contribute significantly to our overall sense of joy and fulfillment.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a motivational speech about work-life balance.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
There's more fun in hunting with the handicap of the bow than there is in hunting with the sureness of the gun.
When you are optimistic, when you are not complaining, when you look at the good side of your life, everybody loves you.
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
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