Neither useless regrets for the past nor profitless forebodings for the future should ever cast their shadows over the present, which taken in itself is always endurable, and may generally be made positively happy. Memory should be purged of all its unpleasantness before its pictures are permitted to appear before the footlights of reflection; and the searchlight of expectation should always be turned toward the pleasures that are still in store for us. Past and future are mainly in our power, so far as the quality of things we remember and anticipate are concerned. And even the brief and fleeting present is mainly filled by reminiscence and anticipation, so that it too is largely what we please to make it.
"The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
If any one of us is not happy all the time, except at the rare instants when toothache, or the news of a friend's illness or death, or a bad turn in our investments takes us by surprise--if happiness is not the dominant tone of our ordinary life, it is simply because we do not want it, in that thoughtful, enterprising, insistent way in which the scholar wants knowledge, or the business man wants money, or the politician wants votes. Whoever is willing to pay the price in prudent planning of his daily pleasures, in relentless exclusion of the enterprises and indulgences that cost more pain than they can return in pleasure; whoever will cut out remorselessly the things in his past life on which he cannot dwell with pleasure, and lop off the considerations which give rise to dread; whoever is willing to pay this Epicurean price for happiness can have it just as soon and just as often as he pays down the cash of a faithful and consistent application of these principles. If any man goes about the world in a chronic unhappiness, it is ninety-nine per cent the fault, not of his circumstances, but of himself. There is not a reader of this book whose circumstances are so black that another person, in those same circumstances, would not find a way to be supremely and dominantly, if not exclusively and continuously, happy. There is not a reader of this book so rich, so blessed with family and friends, so occupied and diverted, but that another person in those same circumstances would be miserable himself, and a source of misery to everybody with whom he came in contact. Epicurus is right, that happiness is up at auction all the time, and sold in lots to suit the purchaser whenever he bids high enough. And the price is not exorbitant: prudence to plan for the simple pleasures that can be had for the asking; resolution to cut off the pleasures that come too high; determination to amputate our reflections the instant they develop morbid symptoms, and to take an anti-toxine against fret and worry, the moment we feel the approach of their contagious atmosphere; concentration, to live in a self-chosen present from which profitless regret and unprofitable anxieties, projected from the past or borrowed from the future, are absolutely banished.