quotations about Happiness
Happy are those men who live without ambition, distrust, or disguise.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
The True Story of My Life
Happiness: We rarely feel it.
I would buy it, beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of dripping blood
For this one transcendent good.
AMY LOWELL
"Happiness", Sword Blades and Poppy Seed
Happiness is a condition of mind not a result of circumstances.
JOHN LUBBOCK
attributed, Character and Conduct: A Book of Helpful Thoughts by Great Writers of Past and Present Ages
False happiness is like false money, it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and allay, and feel the loss.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Very much less than we think does our happiness depend upon that which is external to us. If there is no heaven within, all the externalities of an outward heaven would be insufficient to produce happiness.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
He who strives for happiness is a fool.
The wise man makes happiness for another.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Notebooks for an Ethics
We ne'er can be
Made happy by compulsion.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Three Graves
Happiness is NOT a constant state. As humans we experience and grow through a variety of emotions. The expectation that we should be happy all the time will leave anyone with an expectation hangover.
CHRISTINE HASSLER
"13 Incredibly Smart Tips To Be Happier From Mental Health Experts", BuzzFeed, July 9, 2015
Happiness expanded like an explosion inside me--so extreme, so violent that I wasn't sure I'd survive it.
STEPHENIE MEYER
Breaking Dawn
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Candida
The only true happiness lies in knowing who you are ... and making peace with it.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Narcissus in Chains
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Diary
Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.
JOHNNY CARSON
Happiness Is a Dry Martini
Happiness consists in the consciousness of a life in which the highest Virtue is actively manifested.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
A man who exercises habitually only one set of his faculties, to the neglect of the others, is only a fragment of a man, and his happiness though it may be great, cannot be complete.
JOHN FORBES
Of Happiness in Relations to Work and Knowledge
When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.
JEFFREY BERNARD
Reach for the Ground: the Downhill Struggle of Jeffrey Bernard
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.
ALBERT CAMUS
letter, Jun. 18, 1938