Happiness

To live happily is an inward power of the soul. ~~ Marcus Aurelius

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them. ~~ Don Marquis

A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness. ~~ Elsa Shiaparelli

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived. ~~ Jonathan Swift

No mockery in the world ever sounds to me as hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness … Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. ~~ Charlotte Bronte

Happiness is a warm puppy. ~~ Charles Schulz

No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness. ~~ Graham Greene

Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you to miserable in comfort. ~~ Lord Mancroft

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. ~~ Bulwer Lytton

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. ~~ Mahatma Gandhi

Almost all misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely is, therefore, a great step toward happiness. ~~ Stendhal [Henri Beyle]

When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness … I was right. ~~ Gahan Wilson

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

Money can't buy happiness the way poverty delivers misery. ~~ Unattributed

Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory. ~~ Albert Schweitzer

I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things. ~~ William J. Locke

He is the happiest, be king or peasant, who finds peace in his home. ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. ~~ Unattributed

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. ~~ Margaret Lee Runback

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy. ~~ Paul Sweeney

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong. ~~ J. K. Galbraith

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase. If you pursue happiness you'll never find it. ~~ C. P. Snow

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it. ~~ Don Herold

Don't wish me happiness--I don't expect to be happy … it's gotten beyond that somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor--I will need them all. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is an aspect of all happiness to suppose that we deserve it. ~~ Joseph Joubert

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements. ~~ Christian Bovee

I must say the biggest lesson you can learn in life, or teach your children, is that life is not castles in the skies, happily ever after. The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth. ~~ Goldie Hawn

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations. ~~ Edward de Bono

Memories are everyone's second chance at happiness. ~~ Queen Elizabeth

If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be, I think, an American cow. ~~ William Lyon Phelps

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. ~~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it. ~~ Maurice Maeterlinck

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them. ~~ Leo Tolstoy

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things. ~~ Epictetus

The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past. ~~ Andre Maurois

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. ~~ Bertrand Russell

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good. ~~ Walter Savage Landor

Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time. ~~ Robert Grudin

Happiness is never stopping to think if you are. ~~ Palmer Sondreal

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift. ~~ Tom Stoppard

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit. ~~ Hosea Ballou

Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition. ~~ Arthur Rubinstein

Happiness grows at our firesides, and it is not to be picked in strangers' gardens. ~~ Douglas Jerrold

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is wholly rough. ~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. ~~ Sigmund Freud

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels. ~~ Bertolt Brecht

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness. ~~ Bernard de Fontenelle

Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of unhappiness. ~~ Lao-tzu

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it. ~~ William Feather

Knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance. ~~ George Gordon, Lord Byron

"Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere." ~~ Will Durant

Back of tranquillity lies always conquered unhappiness. ~~ David Grayson

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem. ~~ Bill Vaughan

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. ~~ Mark Twain

It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how … and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss. ~~ Henry Miller

Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others! ~~ William Hazlitt

Few are they who have never had the chance to achieve happiness...and fewer those who have taken that chance. ~~ Andre Maurois

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so. ~~ William Ralph Inge

Endure, and save yourself for happier times. ~~ Virgil

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. ~~ Helen Keller

Happiness is a resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other. ~~ Norman Bradburn

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It is only possible to live happily-ever-after on a day-to-day basis. ~~ Margaret Bonnano

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years. ~~ Bertrand Russell

For that's what a woman, a mother wants--to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own. ~~ Marguerite Duras

Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness, you send out for it. ~~ Rex Reed

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change. ~~ Bertrand Russell

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. ~~ Kin Hubbard

Irresolution on the schemes of life which offer themselves to our choice, and inconstancy in pursuing them, are the greatest causes of all unhappiness. ~~ Joseph Addison

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience. ~~ Sir Isaiah Berlin

The US Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. ~~ Benjamin Franklin

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. ~~ Robert Frost

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a really nice man who wishes she were not. ~~ H. L. Mencken

It's not what isn't, it's what you wish WAS that makes unhappiness … I think I think too much. That's why I drink. ~~ Janis Joplin

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are. ~~ Honore de Balzac

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. ~~ Erich Fromm

Happiness is not in our circumstances, but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are. ~~ John B. Sheerin

If you want idiot happiness take tranquilizers, or pray for senility. Anxiety is inevitable and periodic depression is normal. ~~ Leo Rosten

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived. ~~ Jonathan Swift

The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. ~~ V. S. Pritchett

If this world affords true happiness, it is to be found in a home where love and confidence increase with the years, where the necessities of life come without severe strain, where luxuries enter only after their cost has been carefully considered. ~~ A. Edward Newton

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectually and happily than seriousness. ~~ Horace

From the standpoint of pure reason, there are no good grounds to support the claim the one should sacrifice one's own happiness to that of others. ~~ William Somerset Maugham

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults. ~~ Thomas Szasz

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience. ~~ Sydney Smith

The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend. ~~ Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield

[About living happily ever after:] That's not what life is all about. Life is about conquering one conflict and getting on to another. ~~ Diane Keaton

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it. ~~ C. P. Snow

There is a courage of happiness as well as a courage of sorrow. ~~ Maurice Maeterlinck

All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room. ~~ Blaise Pascal

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts. ~~ William Lyon Phelps

Undergraduates owe their happiness chiefly to the fact that they are no longer at school… The nonsense which was knocked out of them at school is all gently put back at Oxford or Cambridge. ~~ Sir Max Beerbohm

Happiness is not a horse, you cannot harness it. ~~ Chinese proverb

True happiness … is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. ~~ Helen Keller

Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response. ~~ Mildred Barthel

I don't think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains … My advice is: Go outside, to the fields, enjoy nature and the sunshine, go out and try to recapture happiness in yourself and in God. ~~ Anne Frank (see Said Who?)

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread. ~~ Charles Caleb Colton

Happiness is a perfume which you can't pour on someone without getting some on yourself. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. ~~ William Saroyan

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation--what are they? They are the happiest people in the world. ~~ William Lyon Phelps

The hand, the heart, and the head form a triangle that can bring untold happiness, if used together. One alone is not much service, any more than one blade of a scissors. ~~ William C. Hunter

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. ~~ Epictetus

It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is. ~~ Erasmus

Have a variety of interests … These interests relax the mind and lessen tension on the nervous system. People with many interests live, not only longest, but happiest. ~~ George Matthew Allen

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. ~~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Interests are anchors, and I believe they will bring peace and even happiness in the end. ~~ A. C. Benson

Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it. ~~ Holbrook Jackson

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive! ~~ Samuel Goldwyn

Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman--or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle. ~~ George Burns

Human happiness is like Joseph's coat--a thing of many colors. ~~ Josh Billings

I live by this credo: Have a little laugh at life and look around you for happiness instead of sadness. Laughter has always brought me out of unhappy situations. Even in your darkest moment, you usually can find something to laugh about if you try hard enough. ~~ Red Skelton

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty. ~~ Brooks Atkinson

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. ~~ Bertrand Russell

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism. ~~ Santayana

Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again--this is the brave and happy life. ~~ J. E. Buckrose

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all. ~~ Honore de Balzac

[The cat's] purr, when he purred for sheer happiness of life, was as the purr of many kettles. ~~ Oswald Barron

Unhappily the habit of being offensive "without meaning it" leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as being amiable without meaning it. ~~ George Eliot

When the sun sets unhappily

With a red veiled face,

Then will the morning be

Angry with wind and storm. ~~ American Indian proverb

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I'm joining the circus. Although I'm happily married, I spend a great deal of my time mentally living with incompatible husbands. ~~ Anne Tyler

I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source [the family] than from any other--I mean from the attempt to prolong family connections unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. ~~ Samuel Butler

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants. ~~ Jimmy Carter

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends,

But in the worth and choice. ~~ Ben Jonson

Happiness grows at our own firesides and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens. ~~ D. Jerrand

Happiness is the only thing you can give without having. ~~ Unattributed

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered. ~~ Andre Gide

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation. ~~ William H. Sheldon

There are short cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them. ~~ Vicki Baum

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older. ~~ William Lyon Phelps

The ingratitude of the world can never deprive us of the conscious happiness of having acted with humanity ourselves. ~~ Oliver Goldsmith

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. ~~ Louis D. Brandeis

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself. ~~ Victor Hugo

Happiness is how, not what: a talent, not an object. ~~ Herman Hesse

I do not like the idea of happiness--it is too momentary--I would say that I was always busy and interested in something--interest has more meaning than happiness. ~~ Georgia O'Keeffe

[Faith] is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of the sunshine. ~~ Ruth Benedict

Did [Eleanor Roosevelt] succeed because of or in spite of the unhappiness and insecurity of her early life? ~~ James MacGregor Burns

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness. ~~ Bertrand Russell

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. ~~ Baron de Montesquieu

We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men who we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice, and prejudice. How absurd. ~~ Jean de La Bruyere

Rob the average man of his life-illusion and you rob him of his happiness at one stroke. ~~ Henrik Ibsen

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him. ~~ Marguerite Duras

She saw now that the strong impulses which had once wrecked her happiness were the forces that had enabled her to rebuild her life out of the ruins. ~~ Ellen Glasgow

At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke. ~~ Russell Baker

If we spend our lives in loving, we have no leisure to complain, or to feel unhappiness. ~~ Joseph Joubert

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us, that the most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool. ~~ Andre Maurois

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. ~~ Unattributed

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. ~~ Rita Mae Brown

Let me ask you, my friend, whether you do not think that many of our disappointments and much of our unhappiness arise from our forming false notions of things and persons. ~~ Abigail Adams

Much unhappiness results from our inability to remember the nice things that happen to us. ~~ W. N. Rieger

Nine times out of ten, optimism is a sly form of selfishness, a method of isolating oneself from the unhappiness of others. ~~ Georges Bernanos

I can sympathize with people's pains but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. ~~ Aldous Huxley

True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversations of a few select companions. ~~ Joseph Addison

I don't think happiness is necessarily the reason we're here. I think we're here to learn and evolve, and the pursuit of knowledge is what alleviates the pain of being human. ~~ Sting

Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone. ~~ Jerome K. Jerome

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. ~~ William Faulkner

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: "A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others. ~~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I have long since abandoned the notion that higher education is essential to either success or happiness. Hothouses of learning do not always grow anything edible. ~~ Robert Moses

Read the Declaration of Independence to your children as a tradition every Fourth of July. Make sure they understand why the word "pursuit" precedes the word "happiness." ~~ Jeff Bezos

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any ends others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. ~~ Ayn Rand

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

There are four varieties in society; the lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest. ~~ Hippolyte Taine

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses. ~~ Russell Baker

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. ~~ Willa Cather [My Antonia]

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. ~~ Santayana

Purring would seem to be, in [the cat's] case, an automatic safety valve device for dealing with happiness overflow. ~~ Monica Edwards

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness… Permanence means paralysis and death. Only in movement, with all its pain, is life. ~~ Jacob Burckhardt

All happily married people have managed to accept the fact that marriage is no better and no worse than any other human institution. Also, perhaps even more important, they have learned to accept themselves and each other for what they really and honestly are. ~~ Ernest Havemann

It struck me that the movies have spent more than half a century saying "They lived happily ever after" and the following quarter century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work. ~~ Nora Ephron

Our impulses are our birthright… The impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness. ~~ Gertrude Atherton

Once upon a time, many years ago, when I was living happily after…Margaret Anderson

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one that includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else. ~~ J. A. Karr

Happiness means quiet nerves. ~~ W. C. Fields (See Said Who?)

Truth is not always the best basis for happiness… There are people who perish when their eyes are opened. ~~ Wilhelm Stekel

Anyone can tell word lies; but BODY lies require different skills. The art of faking desire or happiness or agreeable fatigue is not vouchsafed to everyone. ~~ Francois Mauriac

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself. ~~ Alice Walker

Since unhappiness excites interest, many, in order to render themselves interesting, feign unhappiness. ~~ Joseph Roux

There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy. ~~ J. Grentell

Many a person seems to think it isn't enough for the government to guarantee him the pursuit of happiness. He insists it also run interference for him. ~~ Unattributed

When I look at what the world does and where people nowadays believe they can find happiness, I am not sure that that is true happiness. The happiness of these ordinary people seems to consist in slavishly imitating the majority, as if this were their only choice. And yet they all believe they are happy. I cannot decide whether that is happiness or not. Is there such a thing as happiness? ~~ Chuang-tzu

Happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. ~~ John F. Kennedy

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it. ~~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds. ~~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

At rare moments in history, by a series of accidents never to be repeated, arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount, hedonistic, mindless, intent upon the glorious physical instant. ~~ Colm MacInnes

Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow. ~~ Ann Eliza Bray

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. ~~ Santayana

Such is the nature of the marriage relations that a breach once made cannot be healed, and it is the height of folly to waste one's life in vain efforts to make a binary compound of two diverse elements. What would we think of the chemist who should sit twenty years trying to mix oil and water, and insist upon it that his happiness depended upon the result of the experiment? ~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was asked. "The sense of competence," was the answer, given without hesitation. ~~ John Buchan

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness. ~~ Graham Greene [The Heart of the Matter]

One kind of happiness is to know exactly at what point to be miserable. ~~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The perfect relationship is that one where two people do not even need to tell each other how they feel or what they want, but care so much for each other that one look and the sound of a voice will tell them what is needed for happiness and calmness in the household. ~~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. ~~ Oscar Wilde

Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality. ~~ William K. Vanderbilt

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. ~~ T. S. Eliot

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness. ~~ Eric Hoffer

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then,
To those who have learned to do without it
And to them only. ~~ Don Marquis

Art is as much a source of happiness for the beginner as for the master. One forgets everything in one's work. ~~ Marie Bashkirtseff [The Journal of a Young Artist]

To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile--that is happiness. ~~ Herman Hesse

Rob the average man of his life illusion and you rob his also of his happiness. ~~ Henrik Ibsen

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. ~~ Santayana

Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have. ~~ Rabbi H. Schachtel

Hope is itself a species of happiness and perhaps the chief happiness which this world affords. ~~ Samuel Johnson

In the turbulence of this anxious and active world many people are leading uneventful, lonely lives. To them, dreariness, not disaster, is the enemy. They seldom realize that on their steadfastness, on their ability to withstand the fatigue of dull repetitive work, and on their courage in meeting constant small adversities depend in great measure the happiness and prosperity of the community as a whole… The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women. ~~ Elizabeth II

There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort and one of them says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. ~~ Woody Allen [Annie Hall, film, 1977]

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. ~~ Agnes Repplier

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it. ~~ Dorothy Day

Prepare for war in time of peace. Not by fortification, by navies, or by standing armies. But by politics which will add to the happiness and the comfort of all our people and which will tend to the distribution of intelligence and wealth equally among all. Our strength is a contented and intelligent community. ~~ Rutherford B. Hayes

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through. ~~ E. M. Forster

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery. ~~ Dante

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep. ~~ William Maxwell

Men just don't "get" that the reason to become involved is for ourselves. Doing more with our children won't simply make women happier or keep them "off our back," but will create a deeper, more positive connection with the kids. ~~ Ron Taffel

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. ~~ Kathleen Norris

One of the ways in which cats show happiness is by sleeping. ~~ Cleveland Amory

When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. ~~ Samuel Johnson

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think wrong. ~~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. ~~ Victor Hugo

Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body, it produces crime, disease, and degradation. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

Thank God for dirty dishes; they have a tale to tell
While other folks go hungry, we're eating pretty well
With home, and health, and happiness, we shouldn't want to fuss;
For by this stack of evidence, God's very good to us. ~~ Unattributed

Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence without giving himself airs about it. ~~ Goethe

The will of man is his happiness. ~~ Friedrich von Schiller