Good Morning Charles,
Actually, that's pretty profound stuff by Tolstoy & Hegel. Thanks for sharing. BTW, Anna Karenina has been rendered to screen many times. I recommend the 1935 American production by Clarence Brown with Greta Garbo as the lead. Very good.

Happiness is lovely to experience, but it's deadly dull and boring as far as novels and written histories go. Something's got to keep us turning the pages. A story without a conflict needing to be resolved is a failure as a story -- the conflict doesn't need to be resolved, but it must be there (eg. Beckett).

The same goes for people. We all want to overcome our flaws, and all the drama of life is in that struggle. But thank goodness there is a limit, because if you were perfect you'd be boring as hell. Like Doug Stanhope says, your sins are the most interesting thing about you.

Actually, while both are good quotes, they don't mean the same thing at all.

They're loosely related, in that they're about happiness and touch on happiness being the absence of strife, but not at all the same thing. One says that there are many reasons for unhappiness, and that happiness is the absence of any of those reasons. The other quote says that history is concerned with notable events, that happiness (being a state) is not an event.