Quotations on Happiness

Man is preceded by a forest and followed by a desert.

~ Unknown

- Anonymous French Graffiti

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others.

~ Ambrose Bierce

The US Constitution does not guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.

~ Benjamin Franklin

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

~ George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness? No man could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Yes, there is Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

~ Abraham Lincoln

If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

~ Edith Wharton

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another city.

~ George Burns

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

No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.

~ Helen Keller

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

~ Emily Dickinson

Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of it's own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing a care.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

~ George Santayana

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

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

~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.

~ Sophocles

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family.... public employment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs.

~ Thomas Jefferson

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

~ Agnes Repplier

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

~ Aristotle

To fill the hour - that is happiness.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few droips on yourself.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensible part of happiness.

~ Bertrand Russell

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

~ Anatole France

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

~ Epictetus

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

~ George Eliot

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

~ Robert Frost

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

~ Albert Camus

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.

~ Albert Schweitzer

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

~ Marcus Aurelius

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

~ Mark Twain

One kind of happiness is to know exactly at what point to be miserable.

~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and it should never be rationalized.

~ G.K. Chesterton

Whoecer is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery.

~ Anne Frank

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.

~ Martha Washington

Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well-deceived.

~ Jonathan Swift

Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

~ Dale Carnegie

There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he find it.

~ George Herbert

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

~ Samuel Johnson

Money and time are the heaviest burdens in life: and among mortals, those who are most unhappy are the ones who have more than they need.

~ Samuel Johnson

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then,
To those who have learned to do without it
And to them only.

~ Don Marquis

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

~ Don Marquis

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

~ C.P. Snow

When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.

~ Stanislaw Lec

Don't mistake pleasures for happiness. They are a different breed of dog.

~ Josh Billings

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

~ Bette Davis

Happiness is brief
It will not stay
God batters at its sails.

~ Euripides

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

~ Frank McKinney "Kin" Hubbard

Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires.

~ Lao-tse

Happiness is good health and bad memory.

~ Ingrid Bergman

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

~ Proverbs

- Chinese Proverb

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

~ Proverbs

- Scottish Proverb

Fear less, hope more;
Eat less, chew more;
Whine less, breathe more;
Talk less, say more;
Love more, and all good things will be yours.

~ Proverbs

- Swedish Proverb

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

~ Francis H. Bradley

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

~ George Sand

Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye.

~ Austin O'Malley

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

~ Charles Kingsley

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular reason for being happy except that they are so.

~ William Ralph Inge

Happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.

~ William Cowper

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

~ William Cowper

Instant gratification takes too long.

~ Carrie Fischer

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

~ Jeremy Bentham

Happiness is how, not what: a talent, not an object.

~ Herman Hesse

To be able to throw one's self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman's smile -- that is happiness.

~ Herman Hesse

Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.

~ Denis Diderot

It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good to check up once in a while to make sure you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.

~ George Lucas Lorimer