Happiness quotes and words of wisdom

"A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness."
Fontenelle


"A happy life consists in tranquility of mind."
Marcus Tullius Cicero


"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."
Jane Austen


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


"Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness ?not pain or mindless self-indulgence ? is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values."
Ayn Rand


"All men have happiness as their object: there is no exception. However different the means they employ, they all aim at the same end."
Blaise Pascal


"All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin."
Lord George Gordon Byron


"And there is even a happiness That makes the heart afraid."
Thomas Hood


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


"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before, Bokonon tells us. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
Kurt Vonnegut


"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


"Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age."
Newton Booth Tarkington


"Don"t mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs."
Josh Billings


"False happiness renders men stern and proud, And that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, And that happiness is always shared."
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu


"Fear less, hope more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Hate less, love more; And all good things are yours."
Jean Baptiste Moliére


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


"For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh


"For me, happiness came from prayer to a kindly God, faith in a kindly God, love for my fellow man, and doing the very best I could every day of my life. I had looked for happiness in fast living, but it was not there. I tried to find it in money, but it was not there, either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be fundamental truths of life, when I began to develop my limited ability, to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts, and fill it with zeal and courage and love, when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly I began to feel the stimulating, warm glow of happiness, and life for me began to flow like a stream between smooth banks."
Andrew Young


"Happiness ... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt


"Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, But the happiest are usually the best."
Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton


"Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed."
Storm (Margaret) Jameson


"Happiness comes through doors you didn"t even know you left open."
Unknown


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


"Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best."
Theodore Isaac Rubin


"Happiness doesn?t depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel towards what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much."
W. D. Hoard


"Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers" gardens."
Douglas Jerrold


"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
Ernest Hemingway


"Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through."
Edward Morgan "E. M." Forster


"Happiness is a by product of an effort to make someone else happy."
Gretta Brooker Palmer


"Happiness is a man?s greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside."
Erich Fromm


"Happiness is a matter of one"s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."
Jean Iris Murdoch


"Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself."
Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Happiness is always a byproduct. 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 attitude of mind, born of the simple determination to be happy under all outward circumstances."
J. Donald Walters


"Happiness is an inside job."
William Arthur Ward


"Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however ? that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc."
Ursula K. LeGuin


"Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing."
George Sheehan


"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
Ingrid Bergman


"Happiness is inward, and not outward; and so, it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are."
Henry van Dyke


"Happiness is no laughing matter."
Richard Whately


"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 reward ? it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment ? it is a result."
Robert Green Ingersoll


"Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling."
Margaret Lee Runbeck


"Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination."
Immanuel Kant


"Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have."
Rabbi H. Schachtel


"Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are"
John B. Sheerin


"Happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy


"Happiness is the harvest of a quiet eye."



"Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness."
Don Marquis


"Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep."
William Maxwell


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


"Happiness isn"t something you experience; it"s something you remember."
Oscar Levant


"Happiness lies, first of all, in health."
George William Curtis


"Happiness mainly depends on man?s ability to work and the way in which he does it."
Richard L. Evans


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


"Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves."
F. Emerson Andrews


"Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has made a fine voyage, or has won the Golden Fleece, and then returns, experienced and knowledgeable, to spend the rest of his life among his family!"
Joachim Du Bellay


"Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who secure within can say: Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today."
Quintus Horatius Flaccus Horace


"Happy the man, and happy he alone, He, who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today."
John Dryden


"He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise"
Thomas Fuller


"He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy."
Boethius


"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords."
Dr. Samuel Johnson


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


"How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart."
Nikos Kazantzakis


"How would you know what happy is if you"ve never been otherwise."
Malcolm S. Forbes


"Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day."
Benjamin Franklin


"I am bigger than anything that can happen to me. All these things, sorrow, misfortune and suffering, are outside my door. I am in the house and I have the key."
Charles Lummis


"I believe the root of all happiness on this earth to lie in the realization of a spiritual life with a consciousness of something wider than materialism; in the capacity to live in a world that makes you unselfish because you are not overanxious about your own comic fallibilities; that gives you tranquility without complacency because you believe in something so much larger than yourself."
Sir Hugh Walpole


"I don"t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
Dr. Albert Schweitzer


"I don"t mow lawns for the reason that I don"t shave."
Kevin Solway


"I have learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go."
Martha Washington


"I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head."
Theodore Roosevelt


"I"ve noticed that a lot of people consider "finding yourself" to be a really frivolous and unproductive study. I"m not sure why. Everything important in life really seems to get down-played so children can be encouraged to join the rat race and make as much money as possible, instead of being told that they should be happy first"
Sanjay Singh


"If all the misfortunes of mankind were cast into a public stack in order to be equally distributed among the whole species, those who now think themselves the most unhappy would prefer the share they are already possessed of before that which would fall to them by such a division."
Socrates


"If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence."
Aristotle


"If only we"d stop trying to be happy we"d have a pretty good time."
Edith Wharton


"If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small."
The Bible


"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
Anaïs Nin


"If you don"t do it, you"ll never know what would have happened if you had done it."
Ashleigh Brilliant


"In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy."
Karl Reiland


"In the misfortune of our best friends, we find something which is not displeasing to us."
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld


"Instant gratification takes too long."
Carrie Fisher


"It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness."
Thomas Jefferson


"It is not by accident that the happiest people are those who make a conscious effort to live useful lives. Their happiness, of course, is not a shallow exhilaration where life is one continuos intoxicating party. Rather, their happiness is a deep sense of inner peace that comes when they believe their lives have meaning and that they are making a difference for good in the world."
Ernest A. Fitzgerald


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


"It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves."
George Eliot


"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is."
Desiderius Erasmus


"It is the person who is blind to what goes on around him that is most surprised when the same things happen to him."
M. Thompson


"It isn"t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It"s only necessary to be rich."
Alan Alda


"It?s no credit to anyone to work too hard."
Edgar Watson "Ed" Howe


"Joy is not in things; it is in us."
Richard Wagner


"Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone."
Sigmund Freud


"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
George Santayana


"Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen."
James Russell Lowell


"Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; But if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness."
Charles Caleb Colton


"Manifest plainness, Embrace simplicity, Reduce selfishness, Have few desires."
Lao Tzu


"Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."
Joseph Addison


"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air ? explode softly ? and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth ? boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn"t go cheap, either ? not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination."
Robert Fulghum


"Men are failures, not because they are stupid, but because they are not sufficiently impassioned."
Struther Burt


"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
George Orwell


"Money can"t buy friends, but you can get a better class of enemy."
Spike Milligan


"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness."
Henrik Ibsen


"Most people would rather be certain they?re miserable, than risk being happy."
Dr. Robert Anthony


"No matter what happens, there"s always somebody who knew it would."
Lonny Starr


"Nobody really cares if you"re miserable, so you might as well be happy."
Cythina Nelms


"Now and then it"s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
Guillaume Apollinaire


"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory."
Rita Mae Brown


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


"Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention."
Greg Anderson


"Only when man"s life comes to end in prosperity can one call that man happy."
Aeschylus


"People don"t notice whether it"s winter or summer when they"re happy."
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


"People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older."
Sydney J. Harris


"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


"Real wealth is not so much what we have as what we are."
Sterling W. Sill


"Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination."
Roy Goodman


"Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy."
Richard Halloway


"Some people cause happiness wherever they go. Some people cause happiness whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde


"Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get."
Dale Carnegie


"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
Herman Cain


"Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. No path is wholly rough."
Ella Wheeler Wilcox


"Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe."
Orison Swett Marden


"The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; for happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up."
Charles Langbridge Morgan


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


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


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


"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."
William Saroyan


"The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, Let no one be called happy till his death; to which I would add, Let no one, till his death be called unhappy."
Elizabeth B. Browning


"The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions ? the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge


"The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it."
Jacques-Yves Cousteau


"The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable."
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


"The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction."
Charles Haddon Spurgeon


"The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depend upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom."
Plato


"The more you love what you are doing, the more successful it will be for you."
Jerry Gillies


"The really happy people are those who have broken the chains of procrastination, those who find satisfaction in doing the job at hand. They"re full of eagerness, zest, productivity. You can be, too."
Norman Vincent Peale


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


"The secret of happiness is this ? let your interests be wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."
Bertrand Russell


"The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony."
V. S. Pritchett


"The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved."
Victor Hugo


"The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of man"
Jean Jacques Rousseau


"The world is so full of a number of things; I am sure we should all be as happy as kings."
Robert Louis Stevenson


"The world, in its best state, is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel."
Samuel Johnson


"There are some days when I think I"m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."
Salvador Dali


"There are two times in every man"s life when he is thoroughly happy; just after he has met his first love and just after he has parted from his last one."
Henry Louis Mencken


"There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life."
Arthur Schopenhauer


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


"There is only one real happiness in life, and that is the happiness of creating."
Frederick Delius


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


"There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness."
Sir John Buchan


"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves."
Sir James Matthew Barrie


"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others, can not keep it from themselves."
Proverb


"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."
Gustave Flaubert


"To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are."
Bruce Lee


"To know that we know what we know, And that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
Henry David Thoreau


"True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future; not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient; for he that is so wants nothing. The great blessings of mankind are within us, and within our reach; but we shut our eyes and, like people in the dark, fall foul of the very thing we search for without finding it. Tranquility is a certain quality of mind which no condition of fortune can either exalt or depress."
Lucius Annaeus Seneca


"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one"s self, but the point is not only to get out ? you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."
Henry James, Jr.


"Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it."
Don Herold


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


"We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart."
Abraham Lincoln


"We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction."
Pierre Corneille


"We possess only the happiness we are able to understand."
Count Maurice Maeterlinck


"What a man does tells us what he is."
F. D. Huntington


"What a wonderful life I"ve had! I only wish I"d realized it sooner."
Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette


"What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him"
Louis L. Mann


"Where, then, does happiness lie? In forgetfulness, not indulgence, of the self. In escape from sensual appetites, not in their satisfaction. We live in a dark, self-enclosed prison, which is all we see or know if our glance is fixed ever downward. To lift it upward, becoming aware of the wide, luminous universe outside ? this alone is happiness. At its highest level, such happiness is the ecstasy that mystics have inadequately described. At more humdrum levels, it is human love; the delights and beauties of our dear earth, its colors and shapes and sounds; the enchantment of understanding and laughing, and all other exercise of such faculties as we possess; the marvel of the meaning of everything, fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded, but ever present."
Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge


"Why, then the world?s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open."
William Shakespeare


"With eyes Of conjugal attraction unreprov?d. Imparadised in one another?s arms. With thee conversing I forget all time. And feel that I am happier than I know."
John Milton


"You know I know you know I know you know."
Thom Gunn


"You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about ? the more you have left when anything happens."
Ethel Barrymore


"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
Albert Camus


Interesting Quotes

The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool.Jane Wagner

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.Albert Schweitzer - French philosopher & physician (1875 - 1965)