Happiness Quote by Swami Sivananda

Austerity slips in here disguised as practical advice. Sivananda starts with a blunt diagnosis - craving is infinite - and that single claim quietly undercuts the modern faith that desire can be managed, optimized, or finally satisfied. The line works because it doesn’t argue against wanting in moralistic terms; it argues against it on structural terms. Craving, in this view, isn’t a series of fixable appetites but a self-renewing machine. Feed it and it grows teeth.

The rhetorical move is almost surgical: “Hence” and “Therefore” give the cadence of logic, not sermon. He’s offering a causal chain that tries to make renunciation feel less like deprivation and more like engineering. Happiness becomes not a prize you chase but an outcome you permit by closing the loop that keeps you running. “Contentment alone” is a provocation too: it rejects the popular compromise that happiness is a blend of ambition and gratitude. Sivananda picks a side, betting everything on interior sufficiency.

Context matters. Writing as a Hindu spiritual teacher in early 20th-century India, Sivananda is speaking from a tradition where desire (kama) is recognized as powerful and natural, but also as a source of bondage when it becomes compulsive attachment. The final imperative - “acquire contentment” - is the twist: contentment isn’t framed as a mood that visits you; it’s a discipline you cultivate, like strength. The subtext is radical agency: if wanting is endless, the only real freedom is choosing where the wanting stops.