Rene Descartes Quotes

What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.

Justice is happiness according to virtue.

Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.

Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.

All action is for the sake of some end; and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose, must take their whole character and color from the end to which they are subservient.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue

To me there's a difference between success and satisfaction. A lot of people have success and no satisfaction. I'm after satisfaction. I

We maintain, and have said in the Ethics, if the arguments there adduced are of any value, that happiness is the realization and perfect exercise of virtue, and this not conditional, but absolute. And I used the term 'conditional' to express that which is indispensable, and 'absolute' to express that which is good in itself.

Virtue is nothing else than right reason

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

The end never justifies the means because there is no end; there are only means.

Never will I pursue happiness, because it is not a goal, just a by-product, and there is no happiness in having or in getting, only in giving.

Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works.

Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.

There's a big difference between being a loner and being lonely. I'm far from lonely. My day is full of things I enjoy, starting with my show. Any time my work is going well and I have a relationship with a woman that's pretty solid, that does it for me.

I sometimes get caught up in the big goals...That aren't really the ultimate goal, which is to be happy for what you have.

Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.