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Happiness Quote by Anne Frank

"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.

Quote Details

TopicHappiness
SourceAnne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl (published 1947). Line attributed to Anne Frank in her diary.
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Frank, Anne. (n.d.). We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-live-with-the-objective-of-being-happy-our-3890/

Chicago Style
Frank, Anne. "We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same." FixQuotes. Accessed February 3, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-live-with-the-objective-of-being-happy-our-3890/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-all-live-with-the-objective-of-being-happy-our-3890/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Anne Frank (June 12, 1929 - 1945) was a Writer from Germany.

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