quotations about Happiness
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
OSCAR LEVANT
attributed, TIME Magazine, August 28, 1972
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that's the best they can hope for.
ALBERT CAMUS
letter, Jun. 18, 1938
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Candida
We ne'er can be
Made happy by compulsion.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Three Graves
Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
The True Story of My Life
I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me.
JEAN ANOUILH
Antigone
Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Notebooks for an Ethics
Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
You Learn by Living
A man who exercises habitually only one set of his faculties, to the neglect of the others, is only a fragment of a man, and his happiness though it may be great, cannot be complete.
JOHN FORBES
Of Happiness in Relations to Work and Knowledge
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Diary
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
JANE AUSTEN
Mansfield Park
Happiness expanded like an explosion inside me--so extreme, so violent that I wasn't sure I'd survive it.
STEPHENIE MEYER
Breaking Dawn
It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Crowds"
False happiness is like false money, it passes for a time as well as the true, and serves some ordinary occasions; but when it is brought to the touch, we find the lightness and allay, and feel the loss.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
He that thinks himself the happiest man, really is so.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
One of the world's greatest mistakes is that of supposing that complete happiness can be found in the attainment of some one thing, whereas the helps to happiness are very numerous. Man is a compound being, possessing physical, intellectual, and spiritual natures, each of which have many wants which must be supplied if man is to be a happy being.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more -- to learning. Always.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.
EPICTETUS
The Art of Living
The duty of happiness becomes clearer when we see how it affects others. It is the merry heart that makes the cheerful countenance, and it is the cheerful countenance that spreads cheer to make other hearts merry. The sunny soul brings sunshine everywhere. A bright and happy temperament is a great social asset, adding to the happiness of the world.
HUGH BLACK
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