The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate
issues. To hold one’s own life as one’s ultimate value, and one’s own happiness
as one’s highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement.
Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of
maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is
an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives
one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the
kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself—the kind that makes one think:
“This is worth living for”—what one is greeting and affirming in emotional
terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.