“Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.”

“Maybe a certain degree of deprivation was necessary to the experience of pleasure, just as suffering was an integral part of joy.”

“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief”

“It's wrong to deprive someone else of a pleasure so that you can enjoy one yourself, but to deprive yourself of a pleasure so that you can add to someone else's enjoyment is an act of humanity by which you always gain more than you lose.”

“Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?”

“There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.”