20 writers about what makes a person happy
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March 20 is the International Day of Happiness. In 2012, all 193 UN member countries voted for its annual holding, agreeing that the pursuit of happiness is the inalienable right of all people in the world. Weekend joins in the celebration and gives examples of ideas about happiness.
1
I needed very little to be happy. Your own table. The health of your own. Any weather. All freedom. – Everything. – And so – to get this unhappy happiness – this is not only cruelty, but stupidity. Life should rejoice at a happy person and encourage him in this rare gift. Because from being happy comes happiness. It came from me.
Marina Tsvetaeva to Vera Merkuryeva, August 31, 1940
2
I am of the opinion that true happiness is impossible without idleness. My ideal: to be idle and love a plump girl. For me, the highest pleasure is to walk or sit and do nothing; My favorite pastime is collecting what is not needed (leaves, straw, etc.) and making useless things.
Anton Chekhov to Lydia Mizinova, March 27, 1894
3
Commit an internal act of self-denial and become a stranger to this world; observe your compatriots as you observe foreigners, marveling at their customs, being patient with their stupidities and indifferent to their hostility. Isn’t this the secret of happiness in our age of mediocrity?
Evelyn Waugh, diary, 9 May 1962
4
Happiness is having a small thread on which things will be strung. For example, going to a dressmaker on Judd Street, or rather thinking about a dress that I could order from her, and imagining that it has already been made, is a thread that is like putting it in a treasure chest, and then pulling it out with pearls already strung.
Virginia Woolf, diary, April 20, 1925
5
Yesterday Sapir called me that the censor Ostretsov gave an approving review of my book about Nekrasov – and that Kubuch was going to publish it. Is this really true? This is almost impossible happiness: to publish about what you love.
Korney Chukovsky, diary, June 4, 1925
6
We did pruning, digging, replanting… You never see the world so beautiful and unexpected as in moments of rest amid gardening work. Only then do you see the landscape in its true colors and inhale all the aroma of the earth. What a blessing – this opportunity to live outside the city, where life is now so cramped and evil.
Maximilian Voloshin Sofya Fedorchenko, April 9, 1925
7
I was happiest when my pen and paper were taken away and I was forbidden to do anything. I didn’t have any anxiety that it was my fault that I wasn’t doing something. My conscience was clear and I was happy. This was when I was in prison. But if they asked me if I wanted to go there again or to a situation like prison, I would say: no, I don’t want to. A person sees salvation in his work, and therefore he must constantly do his work in order to be happy. Only faith in the success of your business brings happiness.
Daniil Kharms, notebooks, 1936
8
Is ill. Happiness point. Everything is. Guests are pouring in and caring.
Velimir Khlebnikov, diary, April 5, 1922
9
The brain works idle, producing melancholy, disgust, boredom; the call of spring does not meet with a response in my heart. A traitor to myself and my everyday rules, I am burdened by boundless, worthless freedom. I will grab hold of any activity as long as it compels me. You feel much happier when you are obligated to something.
Andre Gide, diary, 1931
10
Yes, the best means to true happiness in life is: without any laws, to let out from yourself in all directions, like a spider, a tenacious web of love and to catch there everything that gets into it, an old woman, a child, a woman, and a policeman.
Leo Tolstoy, diary, May 12, 1856
eleven
For the first time, the word “happiness” does not seem ambiguous to me. Perhaps what I mean by it is not quite what people usually mean when they say: “I am happy.” Some persistence in despair sooner or later gives birth to joy. And each of those who surrounded themselves with red flowers in the monastery of San Francesco has a skull in their cell, giving food for thought. Florence is outside the window, and death is on the table. As for me, if I feel that a turning point is taking place in my life, it is not because of what I have gained, but because of what I have lost.
Albert Camus, notebooks, September 15, 1937
12
Almost the whole morning was spent on newspapers. Again pain, blood grudge, powerless rage! Riot in Yegoryevsk, Ryazan province over elections to the city duma <...> – a representative of the council of peasant-worker deputies arrested the mayor, drunken soldiers and others from the crowd killed him. New Life is still positively terrible! Trotsky’s impudent letter from “Crosses” – published in New Life. The day couldn’t have been better. If a person has not lost the ability to expect happiness, he is happy. This is happiness.
Ivan Bunin, diary, August 4, 1917
13
I feel better than I did a few months ago, at least than I did at the beginning of the week. The greens are absorbed so well and calmly that it seems as if happiness itself is pampering me all this week. Our house was almost completely quiet. <...> The girl who lived below us and played the piano every now and then is leaving, apparently, for several weeks. And all this grace was given to me right now, at the end of autumn, that is, at a time when I usually felt especially good.
Franz Kafka to Max Brod, December 15–17, 1910
14
It’s just a mystery how people manage to live in marriage. In my opinion, you need to get married very early, but on the other hand, there are fools who get married once, twice, three times, even at a more mature age. I only know one thing… there is no man in the world who could seduce me into a new marriage. The opportunity to be alone is simply incredible happiness: to take care of yourself, have your own opinion, act independently, decide for yourself, arrange your life yourself, sleep, think, oooh!
Astrid Lindgren to Louise Hartung, July 1961
15
Whether it’s because my demands have become less, or because my real nest is there, only I notice that for some time happiness has come to me much more easily, despite the general dulling of color.
Ivan Turgenev to Elizabeth Lambert, March 26, 1864
16
As long as you and yours love me, what need do I have to worry about this cruel, unfair, calculating world?.. In all my mental anxieties and difficulties, I still feel in the recesses of my soul some kind of divine joy – an inexpressible happiness that seems to be nothing will not violate.
Edgar Allan Poe Annie Richmond, 1848
17
There is nothing more entertaining, funnier than the truth nearby, because you see it and read it so rarely. She hits you with a refreshing rush, runs up your arms to your head, she spins, damn it, damn it, so rare, so beautiful. I saw a lot of it in Selina, in Dostoevsky, in Hamsun, I started laughing when I read them, it was such happiness.
Charles Bukowski to William Packard, April 17, 1992
18
It was a great luck to love so much, luck that I suddenly had a young heart in my chest. I am either happy or suffering because of you, just like when I was fifteen. This suffering and this happiness is youth.
Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren, September 28, 1947
19
Last night I had a dream: as if in Moscow, it seems, on Polyanka, full of cars and people, among the bustle of the city, I saw a cow, a beautiful dark chocolate cow with the head of Isis, with horns like a measure and deep human eyes. She came up to me, I stroked her, and she crossed the street and walked along the sidewalk. I still remember her smell, which remained in my palm: sharp, gentle, homely. The smell of life and happiness.
Andrei Tarkovsky, June 9, 1980
20
It’s cool here, there’s something wrong in the toilet and it’s leaking onto the floor from the tank, and there will probably be other problems, but still I’m happy. If only the house stood.
Mikhail Bulgakov to Vikentiy Veresaev, March 6, 1934
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