Love & Passion Quote by Bernard Meltzer

Happiness, Meltzer implies, isn’t a private stash you hoard in a desk drawer; it’s a social act that only fully “pays out” when it leaves you. The kiss metaphor does quiet rhetorical work: it’s intimate, immediate, and useless in isolation. A kiss can’t be “experienced” as a concept the way you might appreciate a painting alone. It requires a second person, consent, timing, risk. By choosing that image, Meltzer smuggles in an argument about happiness as something relational rather than purely psychological - less a mood you manage than a current that runs between people.

The subtext is a mild rebuke to the self-help version of happiness-as-personal-optimization. If you treat joy like property, you’ll end up guarding it, rationing it, worrying about losing it. Meltzer flips the scarcity instinct: happiness is not diminished by sharing; the sharing is the enjoyment. It’s also a gentle defense of generosity that doesn’t sound like moral homework. Who wants to be told to “be kind” when they’re tired? But “like a kiss” makes giving feel seductive, not dutiful.

Context matters: as a lawyer, Meltzer spent a career in a system designed around adversarial winners and losers, rights and remedies, allocation and blame. In that world, “enjoy it” is often zero-sum. The line reads like a pocket-sized counterphilosophy: the best parts of being human aren’t litigated into existence. They’re exchanged.