We Are Happy When We Are Growing

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.

William Butler Yeats

I was stuck on how to think about this quote other than I dig it and decided to try to find its original context. Since I’m one of a few billion people on this planet, someone already asked the same thing and there’s a Google Answers for that very question here . And to save someone the click, here’s where it came from:

In a long letter dated June 2, 1909, John Butler Yeats wrote to a Miss Grierson:

“It is only when time hangs heavy on our hands that we turn to art and demand the right thing from artists and dramatists and poets and painters. Here they are too busy with the material conditions of happiness, as yet they have not addressed themselves directly to happiness. And happiness… what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. It is the primal law of all nature and the universe, and literature and art are the cosmic movements working in the conscious mind.”

From: Page 121 of J.B. Yeats’ “Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others 1869-1922” (E.P. Dutton & Co., 1946).

This makes me want to write more letters, even if I’m no Yeats.

About the author

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.