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...stretch its legs in.
In all great comic literature, in "Tristram Shandy"
or "Pickwick", there is this sense of space and incorruptibility;
we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale.
It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly
in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think
of them as passing, or enjoy them simply "for those moments' sake."
To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it.
Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized. 
Suppose a man experiences a really splendid moment of pleasure.
I do not mean something connected with a bit of enamel, I mean
something with a violent happiness in it--an almost painful happiness.
A man may have, for instance, a moment of ecstasy in first love,
or a moment of victory in battle. The lover enjoys the moment,
but precisely not for the moment's sake. He enjoys it for the
woman's sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not
for the sake of the...
Chesterton, Gilbert K.
Excerpt from Heretics ·
This quote is tagged Happiness ·
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A little bit about Chesterton, Gilbert K.
Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith). Born May 29, 1874, London, England. Died June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. A British man of letters. Chesterton was a journalist, a scholar, a novelist and short-story writer, and a poet. His works of social and literary criticism include Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), and The Victorian Age in Literature (1913). Even before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922, he was interested in theology and religious argument. His fiction includes The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), the popular allegorical novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), and his most successful creation, the series of detective novels featuring the priest-sleuth Father Brown. · Can we improve this biography? Post your version
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