Our Search for Happiness | James E. Faust | 1999

James E. Faust teaches that true, lasting peace and happiness come from following God's plan. The most direct path to happiness is love.

This speech was given on September 14, 1999.

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"My beloved brothers and sisters, to be on this campus and in your presence is always a joy. I must confess, however, that I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of addressing so many of you and saying something that justifies taking you away from your studies. I do not have the answer to all of life’s questions. I don’t even know all the questions!

I feel a bit like the college professor who asked a student during an examination: “Does the question embarrass you?”

“Not at all, sir,” replied the student; “not at all. It is quite clear. It is the answer that bothers me!” (From 10,000 Jokes, Toasts, and Stories, eds. Lewis and Faye Copeland [Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965], 375 [3842].)

My beloved companion of 56 years is here with me today, and I express appreciation to her. She has walked with me in a joint search for happiness that, on my part, has exceeded my fondest hopes and expectations. Indeed, it is our search for happiness that I wish to discuss today. Having lived quite a few years now, I have concluded that since we don’t always desire that which is good, having all our desires granted to us would not bring us happiness (see Alma 41:3–7). In fact, instant and unrestrained gratification of all our desires would be the shortest and most direct route to unhappiness. The many hours I have spent listening to the tribulations of men and women have persuaded me that both happiness and unhappiness are much of our own making.

As the Prophet Joseph Smith told us:

Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God. [Teachings, 255–56]

The more faithfully we keep the commandments of God, the happier we will be.

Although men are “that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:25), this does not mean that our lives will be filled only with joy, “for it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). Happiness is not given to us in a package that we can just open up and consume. Nobody is ever happy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rather than thinking in terms of a day, we perhaps need to snatch happiness in little pieces, learning to recognize the elements of happiness and then treasuring them while they last.

Pleasure is often confused with happiness but is by no means synonymous with it. The poet Robert Burns wrote an excellent definition of pleasure in these lines:

But pleasures are like poppies spread—
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river—
A moment white, then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
[Tam O’Shanter (1793), lines 59–66]

Pleasure, unlike happiness, is that which pleases us or gives us gratification. Usually it endures for only a short time. As President McKay once said, “You may get that transitory pleasure, yes, but you cannot find joy, you cannot find happiness. Happiness is found only along that well beaten track, narrow as it is, though straight, which leads to life eternal” (CR, October 1919, 180).

We are enticed daily to pursue worldly pleasures that may divert us from the path to happiness. But the path to true and lasting happiness is, repeating the Prophet Joseph Smith’s words, “virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God” (Teachings, 255–56). Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual” (“Character,” Essays: Second Series [1844])...."