quotations about Happiness
We ne'er can be
Made happy by compulsion.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Three Graves
And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more -- to learning. Always.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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 isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
OSCAR LEVANT
attributed, TIME Magazine, August 28, 1972
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.
JOHNNY CARSON
Happiness Is a Dry Martini
The duty of happiness becomes clearer when we see how it affects others. It is the merry heart that makes the cheerful countenance, and it is the cheerful countenance that spreads cheer to make other hearts merry. The sunny soul brings sunshine everywhere. A bright and happy temperament is a great social asset, adding to the happiness of the world.
HUGH BLACK
Happiness
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Candida
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
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
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
Unconditional happiness is the one that is innate in human beings, that is permanent, that has no end, which exists when we reach a stage of acceptance of everything that surrounds us.
LUIS ALVES
Happiness Is Possible: Towards Unconditional Happiness
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
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"
One of the world's greatest mistakes is that of supposing that complete happiness can be found in the attainment of some one thing, whereas the helps to happiness are very numerous. Man is a compound being, possessing physical, intellectual, and spiritual natures, each of which have many wants which must be supplied if man is to be a happy being.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Fall
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
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
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
Happiness expanded like an explosion inside me--so extreme, so violent that I wasn't sure I'd survive it.
STEPHENIE MEYER
Breaking Dawn