quotations about Happiness
The paths by which people journey toward happiness lie in part through the world about them and in part through the experience of their souls. On the one hand, there is the happiness which comes from wealth, honor, the enjoyment of life, from health, culture, science, or art; and, on the other hand, there is the happiness which is to be found in a good conscience, in virtue, work, philanthropy, religion, devotion to great ideas and great deeds.
KARL HILTY
Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life
The belief that happiness has to be deserved has led to centuries of pain, guilt, and deception. So firmly have we clung to this single, illusory belief that we've almost forgotten the real truth about happiness. So busy are we trying to deserve happiness that we no longer have much time for ideas such as: Happiness is natural, happiness is a birthright, happiness is free, happiness is a choice, happiness is within, and happiness is being. The moment you believe that happiness has to be deserved, you must toil forevermore.
ROBERT HOLDEN
Happiness Now: Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast
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
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 a road-side flower, growing on the highways of Usefulness,
Plucked, it shall wither in thy hand; passed by, it is fragrance to thy spirit.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
The happy should not insist too much upon their happiness in the presence of the unhappy.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Happiness flourishes where there is happiness.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
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
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Garden of Eden
We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.
JOSé SARAMAGO
Baltasar and Blimunda
Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future; Age knows her as the Dream.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Happiness ... does not consist in the gratification of desires, nor in that freedom from care, that imaginary state of repose, to which most men look so anxiously forward, and with the prospect of which their labors are lightened, but which is more languid, irksome, and insupportable than all the toils of active life. True, the objects we pursue with so much ardor are insignificant in themselves, and never fulfil our extravagant expectations; but this by no means proves them unworthy of pursuit. Properly to estimate their value, we must take into view all the pleasurable emotions they awaken prior to attainment.
WILLIAM MATHEWS
Hints on Success in Life
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, October 1916
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have the time. But the present time has one advantage over every other--it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The best type of affection is reciprocally life-giving: each receives affection with joy and gives it without effort, and each finds the whole world more interesting in consequence of the existence of this reciprocal happiness. There is, however, another kind, by no means uncommon, in which one person sucks the vitality of the other, one receives what the other gives, but gives almost nothing in return. Some very vital people belong to this bloodsucking type. They extract the vitality from one victim after another, but while they prosper and grow interesting, those upon whom they live grow pale and dim and dull.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Conquest of Happiness
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
Happiness is a hard master -- particularly other people's happiness.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
What is earthly happiness? that phantom of which we hear so much, and see so little; whose promises are constantly given and constantly broken, but as constantly believed; that cheats us with the sound instead of the substance, and with the blossom instead of the fruit. Like Juno, she is a goddess in pursuit, but a cloud in possession.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
As the sea is beautiful not only in calm but also in storm, so is happiness found not only in peace but also in strife.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts