Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

Michael Leunig (1945–2024) was an Australian cartoonist, poet, and cultural commentator whose work—often published in major newspapers—blended gentle satire with spiritual and ethical reflection. This aphoristic line is characteristic of Leunig’s recurring themes: the primacy of compassion, the everyday practice of kindness, and the tension between simple moral truths and the difficulty of living them. While frequently circulated as a standalone quotation in collections and online, it aligns with the tone of his short prose pieces and captions that distill a moral insight into plain, memorable language.

The sentence pairs a promise with a paradox. Leunig suggests that happiness is less a matter of achievement or consumption than of relationship: to “love one another” is to orient the self toward empathy, patience, and generosity. Yet he immediately undercuts any sentimental ease by admitting that this is “as difficult as that.” The difficulty lies not in understanding the instruction but in sustaining it amid ego, fear, resentment, and daily pressures. The quote’s force comes from its moral clarity: it frames love as both the simplest prescription and the hardest discipline, implying that genuine happiness is inseparable from ethical practice.