Love has the power to create happiness. This fact is so common an experience to most people that it is not even necessary to mention it. And if the happiness it creates is sometimes short-lived, the reason probably is that the love that creates it is still imperfect.
It is trite to say that the scarcity of happiness among many people is due to the corresponding scarcity of love among them. It is also commonplace to say that the unhappy man is almost invariably also an unloving man.
Yes, these ideas are so elementary that we probably tire of hearing them. But the fact is that we seem to have such a facility to ignore them, or to forget them.
We forget that selfishness is almost always at the root of all unhappiness and that love, unselfish love, is the basis of all happiness. The man who says, "I am unhappy," actually proclaims to the world what he would be ashamed to admit openly, namely, that he is selfish. To be happy it is necessary to love, and to love truly it is necessary to be completely unselfish. Only the unselfish heart is capable of love and only the loving heart is capable of happiness.
There is a great law of happiness which, to my mind, should rank in importance with any other great discovery in science. It is the law which says: No man is capable of happiness who is incapable of loving one other person than himself.
I call this the Minimum Happiness Law.