Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On Happiness”

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place
secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there,
with no need to remember the past or reach into the future,
where time is nothing to it,
where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time,
and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence,
a feeling that fills our soul entirely,
as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy,
not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness
such as we find in the pleasures of life,
but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness
which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.

— from “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” (1782)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1764
Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788)
Pastel, 52.3 x 37.4 cm.
Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(Montmorency, France)