quotations about Happiness
The spider's most attenuated thread
Is cord, is cable, to man's tender tie
On earthly bliss; it breaks at every breeze.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
A Dream Play
The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.
HARRIET LERNER
Twitter post, January 2, 2015
We are most happy when least aware of happiness.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Conquest of Happiness
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.
EPICTETUS
The Art of Living
Our happiness, like our fortune, is often seriously injured by injudicious economy.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
At the heart of happiness lies peace. It is the last and the highest attainment of the soul.
HUGH BLACK
Happiness
Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?
ALBERT CAMUS
Caligula
Happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving: each receives affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this reciprocal happiness. There is, however, another kind, by no means uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Conquest of Happiness
Happiness hates the timid! So does science!
EUGENE O'NEILL
Strange Interlude
We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.
IMMANUEL KANT
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
To be happy, even to conceive happiness, you must be reasonable or ... you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Egotism in German Philosophy
Happiness is a hard master -- particularly other people's happiness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Happiness is variously associated by different people with a multiplicity of conscious states, such as calm contentment, ecstasy, hilarity, elation, and others. These states all have some claim to be parts or aspects of happiness.... However, they certainly don't all obtain together, and some of them, once again, seem incompatible with each other--ecstasy and calm contentment, for instance.... It may be that happiness is one of those concepts of "folk psychology" that doesn't designate any psychological state, and can't have any explication in terms of the kind of science that tries to discover general laws or regularities.
NICHOLAS P. WHITE
A Brief History of Happiness
We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.
DANIEL GILBERT
Stumbling on Happiness