"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy ... "

"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions."

~ Ayn Rand, from 'Galt’s Speech' in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Hat tip psychologist Jean Moroney — who "chews" the paragraph sentence by sentence in her latest blog post. There's a lot packed in there, she reckons. "When I re-read this paragraph," she says, "I felt like it had taken me 30 years to understand it in detail, and I still had more to learn from it." You too, probably.