Xris, You get pleasure from eating a donut, but just because you are satisfied that you felt in control of the ability to eat the donut and thus doing so... are you any more or less happy in the end? Sure you get pleasure...

And I never said we should be absent of pleasure. That would be like me saying we should be absent of ego. Look at western society. One might say we get a dam lot of pleasure, and yet what is happening to the suicide rate and happiness levels.

A person can have pleasure and lack joy, that much is clear. But can a person lack pleasure and have joy? Something is droning in me the answer is no, maybe my ego.

You think it is pleasure which directly attributes to happiness?

I suppose this can just be answered by discovering the chemicals the body deals with.

Is happiness pleasurable ? Why cant i get an answer..what makes you happy? Am i talking to monks in hairy frocks..

Oh, I see there was a big discussion without me.
I shall try to express some of my views.
1) Happiness is the thing everyone wants to attain. I define happiness only negatively and think it can't be otherwise /in the 3) I'll explain why/. Thus, happiness is absence of suffering.
2) Bodily pleasures do not give joy. Yesterday I had some sweets on my table. But I didn't eat them. Today I had some biscuits. I ate them. And the outcome was the same: I have left my dinner table with the same tranquility, in the first case I didn't lose anything, in the second - didn't get anything. I think it's so evident, that only little children cannot understand this.
3) Joy comes spontaneously and it's sort are, of course, not those "pleasures" that men stive for. Another situation. Yesterday I was reading Phoenician Women by Euripides. The story was about hostility with two brothers which ended death of the both. There was a passage there, that really filled me with spiritual joy after many days since it last had come. Here it is:
...Mother mine, our end is come; I pity thee and my
sister Antigone and my dead brother. For I loved him though he turned
my foe, I loved him, yes! in spite of all...
It was absolutely unexpectedly, I didn't think here I should find anyting like this. If I had been reading something by Tolstoy or Dostoyevski, it wouldn't be so, I guess. Simply because there I'm waiting for sth. like this. I think it quite coincides with what Icon has written.
But nevertheless, joy cannot be called happiness. Joy comes and passes away but sth. even deeper remains. Joy can exist only where there's sth. opposite to it, otherwise one would not experience it. This is just like that we do not feel the smell of oxygen or the taste of water. Dixi

Nobody wants to be happy. If so then they are deluded into thinking that's what they want. No, we just want pleasure, whatever emotion emerges from that we'll stick by it.

Nobody wants to be happy. If so then they are deluded into thinking that's what they want. No, we just want pleasure, whatever emotion emerges from that we'll stick by it.

Why art thou not happy, then? What prevents thee from it? All those worries are ephemeral. They last only as long as thou thikst there will be a certain contentment after attainment of some external things.

I may seem to be not original but here I should like to express my view on ethics. It appears to me that the reasonable and "fitting-all" foundation for it may lay only in one's personal happiness. quote]

The foundation of All truth you wrote twice in the title of your own thread.
Hello!!!

=
MJA

The foundation of All truth you wrote twice in the title of your own thread.
Hello!!!

=
MJA

Make me happy telleth me what maketh the happy or forthwith be liketh the sun on a damp and misty morn, invisible.