I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.
To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world , and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason , this and nothing else is philosophy.
Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature, they act on us not at once, but in succession, andwe are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full.
Become aware of internal, subjective, subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.
And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
There's this kind of almost - kind of a weird kind of elitism that says well maybe - maybe certain people in certain parts of the world shouldn't be free; maybe it's best just to let them sit in these tyrannical societies. And our foreign policy rejects that concept. And we don't accept it. And so we're working.
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.