Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness
is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s
values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation
of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation
of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial
animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your
standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an
end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own
happiness is his highest moral purpose.
But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational
whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will
perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his
happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will
find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is
to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.