True Happiness
All true happiness, as all that is truly beautiful, can only result from order.
- Benjamin Franklin, On True Happiness, published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1735.
You can read the whole letter here.
Well… I may be boned. It goes on to say that maintaining control of your passions to preserve health and well being is of the utmost important.
In short: there is no happiness in constant indulgence.
There is no happiness then but in a virtuous and self-approving conduct. Unless our actions will bear the test of our sober judgments and reflections upon them, they are not the actions and consequently not the happiness of a rational being.
But hedonism is so fun…