HAPPINESS QUOTES XIII

quotations about Happiness

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.

JOHN LUBBOCK

The Use of Life


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


We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive.

THICH NHAT HANH

Peace is Every Step


Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy! Why do we accept that happiness just isn't possible?

ANNE RICE

The Wolves of Midwinter


To while away the day contemplating evils that might have been is to poison the happiness we already have.

CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI

Brisingr


Happiness is a shy thing. Grief is blatant and advertising. If a boy cuts his finger he howls, proclaiming his woe. If he is eating pie he sits still and says nothing.

FRANK CRANE

"Hidden Happiness", Four Minute Essays


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 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


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


Happiness is when you see your husband's old girlfriend and she's fatter than you.

CROFT M. PENTZ

The Complete Book of Zingers


My capacity for happiness ... you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Our happiness, like our fortune, is often seriously injured by injudicious economy.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


Happiness--like love--is itself an attitude.

STEPHANIE DOWRICK

Choosing Happiness


Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?

ALBERT CAMUS

Caligula


Happiness is a hard master -- particularly other people's happiness.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Brave New World


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

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Conquest of Happiness


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


Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


Most folks are just about as happy as they've made up their minds to be.

KEN ALSTAD

Savvy Sayin's


We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.

DANIEL GILBERT

Stumbling on Happiness