My personal test of a life well lived? To me, the answer lies in the quality of our personal relationships and the care we devote to them. Everything else is peripheral, and mostly trivial. Our personal relationships – the test bed of our sensitivity, our moral courage and our capacity for love – are not only the source of life’s richest meanings, but as we struggle to establish them, nurture them and sometimes forsake them, they teach us that notions like happiness or sadness are mere accidents of our fluctuating emotional state, and are incidental to the great realisation that it is in loving we are made whole.

Extract of a fabulous speech from Hugh Mackay at the Happiness & Its Causes 2010 Conference.

(via Zoe Lamont)