quotations about Happiness
We are all travelling to one destination--happiness; but none are going by the same road.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Call no man happy till he is dead.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be “happy” is not included in the plan of “Creation.”
SIGMUND FREUD
Civilization and Its Discontents
The most damaging erroneous belief about happiness is, of course, that happiness is somewhere else--that is, that it is not with you.
ROBERT HOLDEN
Happiness Now: Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast
We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
Irish & English: Portraits and Impressions
What mortal is there, over whose first joys and happiness does not break some storm, dispelling with its icy breath his fanciful illusions, and shattering his altar?
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Méditations Poétiques
You have never seen ugliness in a happy face.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
The Beloved Vagabond
If you ask a man how he is, he searches himself to find a pain to report. If he has nothing but happiness he hates to mention it, and says, "Oh, not half bad."
FRANK CRANE
"Hidden Happiness", Four Minute Essays
In vain do they talk of happiness who never subdued an impulse in obedience to a principle. He who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Your happiness is a one person job -- it begins and ends with you.
JONATHAN LOCKWOOD HUIE
100 Secrets for Living a Life You Love
As to the desire for happiness, we find it is universal. That is one thing upon which all mankind are agreed.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
Happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Mosquitoes
Past happiness augments present wretchedness.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Happiness doesn't depend on how much you have to enjoy ... but how much you enjoy what you have!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Feb. 2, 1998
If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.
HUGH BLACK
Happiness
Much too oft we make life gloomy--
When happy we might be,
If we gathered more of sunshine,
And not dark shadows see.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, Thoughts
Gold, gold! It may not buy happiness, but it can buy you a better state of misery, that's for sure!
COUNT DUCKULA
"Ghostly Gold", Count Duckula
If you wish to be happy, think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and of that which you are able to change.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Brisingr
It seems the more we seek happiness, the more it eludes us. But despite our collective failure to achieve bliss, we continue to find its quest appealing, and the people who peddle pleasure make a lot of money off of it.
SUSIE MEISTER
"The Business of Happiness Is Booming but We're Still Miserable", The Observer, June 25, 2018