Paul Kurtz Quotes

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

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

My life has flourished in so many ways both personally and professionally that I can't ask for a better life.

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

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

Flourishing is everyone's birthright. I'm trying to break this hold that being smiley and cheery has on what people think the good life is.

Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing.

I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.

To seek the highest good is to live well.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good.

It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.

Study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.

Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?

Eating good things and being around people who are happy - you want to be influenced by the world because it has so many cool things about it, but it also has a bunch of bad things about it. Being around people who are happy and people who are creative, that's what you do if you're lucky in your life.

Many wonderful, creative people have won Oscars, so if you win one, you're in their company.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?

Happiness is the highest good

To be happy you have to fulfill your nature. That's what Aristotle taught so many centuries ago, that the road to happiness isn't to go drink more or consume more. The road to happiness is to fully develop your abilities, and then apply them to do good.

Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue

Now the goodness that we have to consider is clearly human goodness, since the good or happiness which we set out to seek was human good and human happiness. But human goodness means in our view excellence of soul, not excellence of body.

This world is not a vale of sorrows if you will recognize discriminatingly what is truly excellent in it; and if you will avail yourself of it for mutual happiness and well-being. Therefore, let us explain as often as possible, and particularly at the departure of life, that we base our faith on firm foundations, on Truth for putting into action our ideas which do not depend on fables and ideas which Science has long ago proven to be false.

All parents want their offspring to be exemplars of virtue and achievement and happiness. But most of all, we want desperately for you to be safe - safe from disease and violence and self-destruction.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Happiness is prosperity combined with virtue.