Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.

Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles. Whether you suffer from anxiety or loneliness or obsessive-compulsive disorder or a dickhead boss who ruins half of your waking hours every day, the solution lies in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience — not the avoidance of it, not the salvation from it.

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy greater than anything else can give.

to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that your life and your death
will not be like
theirs.

Until our world decides that every human matters, that everyone has a right to food and safety and freedom and healthcare and equality, it is the obligation of those privileged to have food and safety and freedom and healthcare and equality to fight tirelessly for those who do not.

He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

For me, there is no happiness without freedom, and freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves.

If you fight for it, I’ll fight with you. If you don’t want to fight for it, then I have to find someone who wants it as bad as I do. — s. mcnutt

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it.

The very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.

Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.

Happiness seems to depend on leisure, because we work to have leisure, and wage war to live in peace.

You have to make your own happiness, wherever you are. Your job isn't going to make you happy, your spouse isn't going to make you happy, the weather isn't going to make you happy....You have to decide what you want, and you have to find that way of doing it, whether or not the outside circumstances are going to participate in your success...You have to be able to create your own happiness, period. And if you can't, then you need to find a good shrink who can help you figure out what it's going to take.