quotations about Happiness
Happiness depends more on how life strikes you than on what happens.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's
Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
Stranger in a Strange Land
You've got to be responsible for your own happiness -- you can't expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Heart of the Matter
The continual search for happiness is a primary reason that so many people are miserable. If you make happiness your goal, you are almost certainly destined to fail. You will be on a continual roller coaster, changing from successful to unsuccessful with every mood change. Life is uncertain, and emotions aren’t stable. Happiness simply cannot be relied upon as a measure of success.
JOHN C. MAXWELL
Your Road Map for Success
Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I have steadfastly believed.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to John Page, Jul. 15, 1763
The journey to true happiness and to happiness now is not a journey of physical distance or time; it is one of personal "self-recovery," where we remember and reconnect consciously to an inner potential for joy--a paradise lost--waiting to be found.
ROBERT HOLDEN
Happiness Now: Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast
If kings would only determine not to extend their dominions until they had filled them with happiness, they would find the smallest territories too large, but the longest life too short for the full accomplishment of so grand and so noble an ambition.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
But for now, happiness throws stones.
It guards itself.
I wait.
MARKUS ZUSAK
Getting the Girl
We are all travelling to one destination--happiness; but none are going by the same road.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Happiness is less regulated by external circumstances than inward enjoyment. Whoever is happy in the satisfaction of himself feels imperturbable felicity; but he, who trusts entirely to the world for the disposition of his peace, must inevitably participate [in] many privations and disappointments.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
False pleasures come from without and are imperfect: happiness is internal and our own.
JOHN LUBBOCK
Peace and Happiness
He is the happiest man who can set the end of his life in connection with the beginning.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Post Mortem"
Happiness can not come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
speech at Groton, May 24, 1904
Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
I believe that happiness can be found. If I thought otherwise, I should be silent and not make unhappiness the more bitter by discussing it.
KARL HILTY
Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
MAXIM GORKY
attributed, Know Your Limits