I thought of this virtue of life, this perseverance, as of a hymn to happiness, a silent hymn prevailing over the roars of the conquest.
Nothing discourages life except, perhaps, the excess of itself.
If Europe, too rich and too beautiful, is to be henceforth the vessel of all the sorrows, it is because happiness has assumed an unclean mask: the mask of pleasure. For pleasure is not joy.
Patience! The whole world has not been poisoned.
I know of mosses that succeed in living upon acids. The antiseptics, whose property it is to destroy living things, are at times invaded by these obstinate fungi which encamp there, acclimatize themselves and modestly fulfil their destiny.
One must have confidence in happiness. One must have more confidence than ever, for never was happiness more greatly lacking to the mass of men. So cruelly is the world astray, so immensely, so evidently, too, that we cannot wait for the consummation to denounce it and reprove it.
Like those algæ, those mosses, those laborious lichens that attach to the very ruins themselves their infinite need of happiness, let us seek our joy in the distress of the present and make it open for us, like a plant beaten by the winds, in the desert of a blasted world.
IV
You must understand that this concerns happiness and not pleasure, or well-being, or enjoyment, or the delight of the senses.
All cultivated people have created different words to designate these different things. All have committed their moralists to the task of preserving simple souls from a confusion which our instincts favor.