"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same"
About this Quote
Anne Frank’s line lands with a quiet audacity: she reaches for a shared human motive while writing from a place designed to strip people of motives altogether. “We all live with the objective of being happy” isn’t a sunny poster slogan in her mouth; it’s a claim made under siege. In the Secret Annex, happiness is no longer a lifestyle choice or a reward for good behavior. It becomes a stubborn, almost contraband insistence that the inner life still counts when the outer world is collapsing.
The sentence works because it pairs a universal with a correction. First comes the big, disarming “we all,” inviting the reader into common cause. Then the pivot: “our lives are all different and yet the same.” The subtext is a refusal of the categories being used to decide who deserves to live. Difference is real - class, temperament, nationality, even the petty frictions of people trapped together - but it doesn’t cancel the underlying sameness of wanting joy, safety, a future. She’s arguing, gently, against dehumanization without naming the machinery of it.
Context sharpens the intent. Frank was a teenager writing a diary that doubled as a rehearsal for adulthood. The line reveals a writer testing the moral reach of her own voice: can her private observations speak beyond her hiding place? That’s the haunting power here. It’s not naïve optimism; it’s a young mind insisting that the common denominator of happiness remains legible even when the world is trying to make certain lives unreadable.
The sentence works because it pairs a universal with a correction. First comes the big, disarming “we all,” inviting the reader into common cause. Then the pivot: “our lives are all different and yet the same.” The subtext is a refusal of the categories being used to decide who deserves to live. Difference is real - class, temperament, nationality, even the petty frictions of people trapped together - but it doesn’t cancel the underlying sameness of wanting joy, safety, a future. She’s arguing, gently, against dehumanization without naming the machinery of it.
Context sharpens the intent. Frank was a teenager writing a diary that doubled as a rehearsal for adulthood. The line reveals a writer testing the moral reach of her own voice: can her private observations speak beyond her hiding place? That’s the haunting power here. It’s not naïve optimism; it’s a young mind insisting that the common denominator of happiness remains legible even when the world is trying to make certain lives unreadable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Happiness |
|---|---|
| Source | Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl (published 1947). Line attributed to Anne Frank in her diary. |
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