quotations about Happiness
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 not so much in the amount of treasure we possess as in being content with what we have.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
What is the worth of anything,
But for the happiness 'twill bring?
RICHARD OWEN CAMBRIDGE
Learning
Worldly happiness is like a golden palace, but with no entrance.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The future seems a little gloomy! Go to bed early, sleep well, eat moderately at breakfast; the future looks brighter. The world's outlook may not have changed, but our capacity for dealing with it has. Happiness, or unhappiness, depends to some extent on external conditions, but also, and in most cases chiefly, on our own physical and mental powers. Some people would be discontented in Paradise, others ... are cheerful in a graveyard.
ARTHUR LYNCH
Moods of Life
Happiness consists in the consciousness of a life in which the highest Virtue is actively manifested.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The happy should not insist too much upon their happiness in the presence of the unhappy.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
There is a difference between happiness, the supreme good, and the final end or goal toward which our actions ought to tend. For happiness is not the supreme good, but presupposes it, being the contentment or satisfaction of the mind which results from possessing it.
RENé DESCARTES
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
Maybe you have to wait for happiness. Maybe the rest is only words.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
The Writing Life
If I think that happiness is possible, I know all too well its hidden nature--and by what wretched paradox, instead of being an excess that would elevate us in dignity, it is a numbness we are only aware of afterward.
ALBERT CAMUS
letter, Jun. 18, 1938
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Madame Louise Colet, Aug. 13, 1846
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
Happiness flourishes where there is happiness.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.
AYN RAND
Anthem
Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?
ALBERT CAMUS
Caligula
You have to fight to carve little pieces of happiness out of your life, or the everyday emergencies will eat up everything.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Cerulean Sins
It may be obvious that this world has not been made merely for the ease and happiness of men, and obvious that we are not made to inhabit an earthly paradise, but the human heart can never cease to long for satisfaction of desire. This primal need has been the driving power to transform society and to improve the conditions of life. Even when men miss happiness as an experience, they feel they were made for it. The capacity for joy, which is their natural human instinct, demands fruition. To ask them to abandon the quest for happiness and to acknowledge it a phantom would be to make a mock of life.
HUGH BLACK
Happiness