Michelle

“Become your own best friend, acquire self-esteem, think positively, dare to live in harmony, etc. - the multitude of books on the subject suggests that it isn't so easy. Happiness not only constitutes, along with the market in spirituality, the biggest industry of the age; it is also and very precisely the new moral order, and that is why depression is spreading and every rebellion against this slimy hedonism elicits unhappiness and distress. We are guilty of not being content, a problem for which we have to answer to everyone else and before our inner jurisdiction as well.”
― Pascal Bruckner

“When you find yourself in dark places, there's always a light somewhere in that darkness, and even if that light is inside of you, you can illuminate your own darkness by shedding that light on the world.”
― Yusef Salaam, Punching the Air

“Instead of admitting that happiness is an art of the indirect that is achieved or not through secondary goals, it is presented as if it were an immediately accessible objective, and recipes are provided. Whatever the method chosen, psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, the presupposition is everywhere the same: contentment is within your reach, all you have to do is undergo a "positive conditioning," an "ethical discipline" that will lead you to it. This amounts to an astonishing inversion of the will, which seeks to establish its protectorate over psychic states and feelings that are traditionally outside its jurisdiction. It wears itself our trying to change what does not depend on it (at the risk of not dealing with what can be changed).”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

“Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.”
― Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy