Happiness Quote by Leo Buscaglia

Buscaglia’s move here is to puncture the idea of happiness as a locked room. “Secret” gets treated like a cultural commodity: something you hunt, buy, decode, and finally possess. He calls that bluff. Happiness isn’t hidden; it’s embarrassing in its plainness, sitting right next to the daily decisions we’d rather not label as decisions at all.

The line works because it shifts responsibility without sounding punitive. “What we call” gently indicts the audience’s habit of mythmaking: we prefer happiness as mystery because mystery lets us postpone action. If it’s a secret, you can’t be blamed for not having it yet. If it’s “our willingness,” the obstacle isn’t fate, trauma, or bad luck (though those are real); it’s the quieter, repeatable act of choosing engagement over retreat.

“Choose life” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not just survival or optimism; it’s a commitment to participation: showing up, risking attachment, tolerating disappointment, letting other people matter. In the late-20th-century self-help landscape that Buscaglia helped shape, this is a corrective to passive consumer spirituality. The subtext is almost moral, but he frames it as agency rather than virtue. You don’t solve happiness like a puzzle. You practice it like a stance.

The sting is that the “secret” isn’t withheld by gurus; it’s withheld by us, each time we opt for numbness, cynicism, or postponement dressed up as sophistication.