Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

More from The Life of Reason, Vol. 1

• Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
• American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
• Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
• Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
• I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.