Happiness Quotes

A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness. - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles. - Washington Irving

A man's life is what his thoughts make of it. - Marcus Aurelius

A merry heart doeth good like medicine. - Proverbs 17:22

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance. - Anatole France

A pessimist sees the difficulty in opportunity, and an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. - Winston Churchill

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. - George Santayana

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. - Benjamin Disraeli

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over compensations made for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. - Aldous Huxley

Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor. - Paul Hawken

Always remember to forget the things that made you sad. But never forget to remember the things that made you happy. - Anonymous

An optimist thinks this is the best of all worlds. A pessimist fears the same may be true. - Doug Larson

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. - John Stuart Mill

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead. - Scottish Proverb

Be happy. It's one way of being wise. - Colette

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying. - Aldous Huxley

Beauty is the promise of happiness. - Henri B. Stendhal

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes. - William Shakespeare

But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. - Aldous Huxley

By heaven we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and endless in duration. - Benjamin Franklin

Character is power; it makes friends, draws patronage and support and opens the way to wealth, honor and happiness. - John Howe

Consciously or unconsciously, everyone of us does render some service or another. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and it will make not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large. - Mahatma Gandhi

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government. - Aristotle

Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. - Harold Whitman

Don't miss a rainbow because you're looking down; look up and see it.

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it. - Jacques Prévert

For every minute you are angry you loose sixty seconds of happiness. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief. - Cicero

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. - Frank Lloyd Wright

G-d gives nothing to those who keep their arms crossed. - West African Proverb

Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society. - William Makepeace Thackeray

Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth. . . Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it. - John Templeton

Happiness depends upon ourselves. - Aristotle

Happiness depends, as nature shows, Less on exterior things than most suppose. - William Cowper

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times. - Anon.

Happiness is a hard master ... particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestionably, than truth. - Aldous Huxley

Happiness is a path, not a destination. - Anonymous

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness. - Robertson Davies

Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions. - Aristotle

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

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

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

Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring. - Chinese Proverb

Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life. - Burton Hills

Happiness is not a goal. it is a by-product. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind. - Alice Meynell

Happiness is not a reward-it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment-it is a result. - Robert Green Ingersoll

Happiness is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere. - Chamfort

Happiness is not having what you want. It's wanting what you have. - Anonymous

Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye. - Austin O'Malley

Happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it. - Aristotle

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

Happiness isn't getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got. - Garth Brooks

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember. - Oscar Levant

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

Happiness never decreases by being shared. - Buddha

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route. - Charles Caleb Colton

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home. - Johann von Goethe

How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success. - Anne Sophie Swetchine

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. - Dean William R. Inge

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

I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull. - William Congreve

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. - Henry Miller

I would not give one moment of heaven for all the joy and riches of the world, even if it lasted for thousands and thousands of years. - Martin Luther

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

If you want happiness for an hour take a nap. If you want happiness for a day go fishing. If you want happiness for a year inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime help someone else. - Chinese Proverb

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible. - St. Augustine

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. - Thomas Paine

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while. - Don Marquis

It is important to possess short term pessimism, and long term optimism.

It is necessary to hope ... for hope itself is happiness. - Samuel Johnson

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, that gives happiness. - Thomas Jefferson

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

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. - Kin Hubbard

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. - Martha Washington

Joy has nothing to do with material things, or with man's outward circumstance...A man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched, and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy. - William Barclay

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. - George Bernard Shaw

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust

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

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. - Robert Heinlein

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

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. - Abraham Lincoln

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy. - Robert Anthony

Never let someone take away your smile. - Anonymous

Never mind your happiness; do your duty. - William J. Durant

No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy. - Thomas Fuller

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right. - Helen Keller

No pleasure is a bad thing in itself: but the means which produce some pleasures bring with them disturbances many times greater than the pleasures. - Epicurus

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy. - Cynthia Nelms

Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness. - Andre Gide

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. - Bertrand Russell

Of mortals there is no one who is happy. If wealth flows in upon one, one may be perhaps Luckier than one's neighbor, but still not happy. - Euripides

One Happiness scatters a thousand sorrows. - Chinese Proverb

One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way. - Isabelle Eberhardt

One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to. - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market place. - Anonymous

Only when a man's life comes to its end in prosperity dare we pronounce him happy. - Aeschylus

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. - H. Jackson Browne

Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness. - Chuang Tzu

Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination. - Roy M. Goodman

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

Seven days without laughter makes one weak. - Mort Walker

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Smile, it's a tranquilizer with no side effects. - Anonymous

Smiles are free; don't save them. - Anonymous

So many of us had parts of our childhood that were painful and unpleasant. In order to escape, we often lived in our imaginations and dreamed of days in the future when life would be different, when it would finally be the way that we wanted it to be. This was the only way we thought we could have any control of our lives...when we grew up...when we could be in charge. As long as we continue to think we will be happy in the future, we will never be happy in the moment, and that is the same as saying that we will never be happy. If we think that our lives will be better when we get that better job or retire, stay or go, gain or lose weight, or when our children grow and leave or come back, we are putting off the happiness that there is in today. - Anonymous

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. - Oscar Wilde

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. - H. Jackson Brown

Suppression of desire leads to extinction of suffering. - Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

Take the time to laugh, for it's the music of the soul. - Anonymous

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. - Orison Sweet Marden

The “18/40/60” rule to happiness: At age 18, people care very much about what others think of them. By age 40, they learn not to worry what others think. By age 60, they figure out that no one was thinking about them in the first place. – Daniel Amen, psychiatrist

The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number. - Francis Hutcheson

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. - Anonymous

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. - Mark Twain

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government. - Thomas Jefferson

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. - Benjamin Franklin

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency. - Quentin Crisp

The discontented man finds no easy chair. - Benjamin Franklin

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise man grows it under his feet. - James Oppenheim

The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. - Allan K. Chalmers

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. - William James

The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into actions. - Madame de Stael

The happiest life, seen in perspective, can hardly be better than a stringing together of odd little moments. - Norman Douglas

The happiest people don't always get the best of everything; they just make the best of everything. - Anonymous

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. - Marcus Aurelius

The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself. - Publilius Syrus

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle. - Albert Einstein

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. - Virginia Woolf

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping . - Claudius Claudianus

The road to freedom is full of thorns and fire, yet happy is he who follows it. - Aminu Kano

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

The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach. - Lin Yutang

The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings. - Dave Weinbaum

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. - George Eliot

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

The trick is not how much pain you feel-but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses. - Erica Jong

The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life. - William Morris

The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it, you have to catch up with it yourself. - Ben Franklin

The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. - Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not. - Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are only two things to aim at in life: First, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second. - Logan Pearsall

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one-keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy. - Mark Twain

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness. - Marguerite Gardiner Blessington

There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy. - Anonymous

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved. - George Sand

They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. - Edith Wharton

Those who wish to sing always find a song. - Swedish proverb

To fill the hour-that is happiness. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

To forgive is the highest, Most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness. - Robert Muller

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance. - Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)

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

To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy. - Henri Frederic Amiel

Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day. - Anonymous

True happiness consists in making happy. - Hindu Proverb

True happiness is of a retired nature, an enemy to pomp and noise. - Joseph Addison

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself. - Samuel Johnson

We do good because it frees the heart. It open us to a wellspring of happiness. - Sharon Salzberg

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. - George Bernard Shaw

We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty. - Victor Hugo

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false that was not accompanied by at least one laugh. - Friedrich Nietzsche

What disturbs people's minds are not events but their judgments on events. -Epictetus

What is a long life without joy, compared with a short but joyful one? - Hsiang Hsiu

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree. - Sigmund Freud

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what kind of person you are. - C.S. Lewis

When ambition ends, happiness begins. - Hungarian Proverb

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. - E. B. White

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. - EB White

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

When tears are on the outside, healing is on the inside. - Anonymous

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter. - Albert Camus

Wherever you go, go with all your heart. - Confucius

Whoever does not respect confidence will never find happiness in their path. - Anonymous

Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. - Albert Einstein

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by foolish preparation. - Jane Austen

Yesterday is but a dream, Tomorrow is but a vision. Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day. - Sanskrit Proverb

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them. - Albert Camus

You do not sing because you are happy, you are happy because you are singing. - Anonymous

You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all. - Horace

You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face and show the world all the love in your heart. Then people are going to treat you better. You're going to find, yes you will, that you're as beautiful as you feel. - Carole King

Happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy. A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources. Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this older sense was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, and is still used in virtue ethics.

While direct measurement of happiness presents challenges, tools such as The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire have been developed by researchers. Psychology researchers use theoretical models that include describing happiness as consisting of positive emotions and positive activities, or that describe three kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Research has identified a number of attributes that correlate with happiness: relationships and social interaction, extraversion, marital status, employment, health, democratic freedom, optimism, religious involvement, income and proximity to other happy people ... So with all that said, Buddy wants to know, "Are you really happy?"