Happiness

Some one has said that “happiness is the relation between what you think you ought to have, and what you have.”  If you have fifty dollars and think you ought to have a hundred you are just as unhappy as if you had half a million and thought you ought to have a million.  The relation idea is a good one.  We cannot get happiness; it gets us.

It is a by-product from a search for something else.  If one expends effort and money and time to benefit or to help others, one of the principal by products of his effort will be self satisfaction or happiness.  If he should go out to buy happiness for himself, though he should spend millions upon it, his effort will be a failure.

Men toil and struggle and elbow each other out of the way in a mad search for wealth in the belief that if they acquire so much they will be happy.  They never reach the point at which they consider they have enough and the longer they search the further they get away from happiness.