quotations about Happiness
Happy people die whole, they are all dissolved in a moment, they have had what they wanted.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Post Mortem"
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
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
Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
Moon Called
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
I'd shoot the Bluebird of Happiness if it squawked as loud as you.
MARSHAL JIM CROWN
"Knife in the Darkness", Cimarron Strip
The pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a right of all Americans, as well as on the self-improvement shelves of every American bookstore. Yet the scientific evidence makes it seem unlikely that you can change your level of happiness in any sustainable way. It suggests that we each have a fixed range for happiness just as we do for weight. And just as dieters almost always regain the weight they lose, sad people don't become lastingly happy, and happy people don't become lastingly sad.
MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN
preface, Authentic Happiness
Those who possess that treasure which no thief can take away,
Which, though on suppliants freely spent, increaseth day by day,
The source of inward happiness which shall outlast the earth--
To them e'en kings should yield the palm, and own their higher worth.
BHARTRHARI
"The Praise of the Wise Man"
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves--such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Happiness does not depend upon surroundings, but upon disposition.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke
The best recipe for happiness and contentment I've seen is this: dig a big hole in the garden of your thoughts and put into it all your disillusions, disappointments, regrets, worries, troubles, doubts, and fears. Cover well with the earth of fruitfulness. Water it from the well of contentment. Sow on top the seeds of hope, courage, strength, patience, and love. Then when the time for gathering comes, may your harvest be a rich and fruitful one.
ZIG ZIGLAR
Staying Up
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
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 is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.
JOHNNY CARSON
Happiness Is a Dry Martini
But for now, happiness throws stones.
It guards itself.
I wait.
MARKUS ZUSAK
Getting the Girl
And happiness ... Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one ... What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign -- the divine minus.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
For no man lives, who always happy is.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
There is a restless endeavour in the mind of man after Happiness. This appetite is wrought into the original frame of our nature, and exerts itself in all parts of the creation that are endued with any degree of thought or sense. But, as the human mind is dignified by a more comprehensive faculty than can be found in the inferior animals, it is natural for men not only to have an eye each to his own happiness, but also to endeavour to promote that of others.
GEORGE BERKELEY
The Works of George Berkeley
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