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Quotations about happiness

Helen KellerWhen one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

 - Helen Keller

Tags:   happiness  opportunity  

Robert HeinleinLove is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

 - Robert A. Heinlein

Tags:   happiness  love  

Oscar WildeSome cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

 - Oscar Wilde

Tags:   happiness  

Anne FrankI don't have much in the way of money or worldly possessions, I'm not beautiful, intelligent or clever, but I'm happy, and I intend to stay that way! I was born happy, I love people, I have a trusting nature, and I'd like everyone else to be happy too.

 - Anne Frank

Tags:   beauty  happiness  intelligence  wealth  

Anne FrankEarning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.

 - Anne Frank

Tags:   happiness  laziness  work  

Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.

 - Lysander Spooner

Tags:   crime  happiness  vices  

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

 - Aristotle

Tags:   happiness  life  purpose  

BuddhaThere is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.

 - Gautama Buddha

Tags:   happiness  

Marcus Tullius CiceroFriendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.

 - Marcus Tullius Cicero

Tags:   friendship  grief  happiness  joy  misery  

Aphra BehnAs love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.

 - Aphra Behn

Tags:   happiness  love  

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

 - Mahatma Gandhi

Tags:   happiness  harmony  

EpicurusOf all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

 - Epicurus

Tags:   friendship  happiness  

Jim RohnLearn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.

 - Jim Rohn

Tags:   aspiration  happiness  

Carl JungThere are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

 - Carl Jung

Tags:   balance  happiness  sadness  

Carl JungI have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking.  Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

 - Carl Jung

Laura Ingalls WilderAs you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.

 - Laura Ingalls Wilder

Tags:   happiness  kindness  love  

Leo TolstoyA quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor -- such is my idea of happiness.

 - Leo Tolstoy

Tags:   country  happiness  nature  neighbors  pleasure  rest  

Friedrich NietzscheThe most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.

 - Friedrich Nietzsche

OshoYou feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.

 - Osho

Tags:   accountability  anger  feelings  happiness  

Francis QuarlesIn the height of thy prosperity expect adversity, but fear it not. If it come not, thou art the more sweetly possessed of the happiness thou hast, and the more strongly confirmed. If it come, thou art the more gently dispossessed of the happiness thou hadst, and the more firmly prepared.

 - Francis Quarles

Tags:   adversity  happiness  prosperity  

Johann Wolfgang von GoetheHe is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tags:   happiness  home  peace  

Samuel Taylor ColeridgePleasure, most often delusive, may be born of delusion. Pleasure, herself a sorceress, may pitch her tents on enchanted ground. But happiness (or, to use a more accurate and comprehensive term, solid well-being) can be built on virtue alone, and must of necessity have truth for its foundation.

 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tags:   delusion  happiness  pleasure  virtue  

AristotleLet us be well persuaded that everyone of us possesses happiness in proportion to his virtue and wisdom, and according as he acts in obedience to their suggestion.

 - Aristotle

Tags:   happiness  virtue  wisdom  

Bertrand RussellOf all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness

 - Bertrand Russell

Tags:   caution  happiness  love  

AristotleThe good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties In conformity with excellence or virtue . . . Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; arid similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.

 - Aristotle

Tags:   excellence  happiness  lifetime  virtue  

Fyodor DostoevskyImagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that It was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature. . . and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?

 - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tags:   creation  destiny  happiness  innocence  torture  

Marcus AureliusThe happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

 - Marcus Aurelius

Tags:   happiness  thought  virtue  

David HumeDelicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion; it enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and our misery.

 - David Hume

Tags:   happiness  misery  passion  taste  

David HumeHe is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

 - David Hume

David HumeIn this sullen apathy neither true wisdom nor true happiness can be found.

 - David Hume

Tags:   apathy  happiness  wisdom  

David HumeThe great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness.

 - David Hume

Tags:   happiness  work  

David HumeTo be happy, the passions must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

 - David Hume

Tags:   happiness  passions  poverty  

David HumeWhen we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness.

 - David Hume

Tags:   happiness  life  uncertainty  

Horace In a cottage there may be found more real happiness than kings or their favorites enjoy in palaces.

 - Horace

Tags:   happiness  modesty  simplicity  

Horace Happy and thrice happy are they who enjoy an uninterrupted union, and whose love, unbroken by any complaints, shall not dissolve until the last day.

 - Horace

Tags:   happiness  love  marriage  

Michel de MontaigneIt is fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy.

 - Michel de Montaigne

Tags:   happiness  possessions  

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

 - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Tags:   happiness  

Samuel Taylor ColeridgeThe 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

Tags:   compliments  happiness  smiles  

Limbo is the place. In Limbo one has natural happiness without the beatific vision; no harps; no communal order, but wine and conversation and imperfect, various humanity. Limbo for the unbaptized, for the pious heathen, the sincere skeptic.

 - Evelyn Waugh

Tags:   afterlife  conversation  happiness  limbo  skepticism  wine  

Michel de MontaigneWhatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate fit to relish and taste them; it is fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy.

 - Michel de Montaigne

Tags:   goals  happiness  possession  

Isaiah BerlinLiberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

 - Isaiah Berlin

Tags:   fairness  happiness  justice  liberty  

William PennFrugality is good if Liberality be joined with it. The first leaving off superfluous expenses; the last bestowing them to the benefit of others that need. The first without the last begins covetousness; the last without the first begins prodigality: both together make an excellent temper. Happy the place where ever that is found. Were it universal, we should be cured of two extremes, want and excess: and the one would supply the other, and so bring both nearer to a mean; the just degree of earthly happiness

 - William Penn

Tags:   balance  extremes  frugality  happiness  

Samuel JohnsonThat all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.

 - Samuel Johnson

Tags:   happiness  satisfaction  

Aldous HuxleyActual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

 - Aldous Huxley

Tags:   happiness  stability  struggle  

Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be created. In the art of marriage the little things are the big things...

It is never being too old to hold hands.

It is remembering to say "I love you" at least once a day.

It is never going to sleep angry.

It is at no time taking the other for granted; the courtship should not end with the honeymoon, it should continue through all the years.

It is having a mutual sense of values and common objectives.

It is standing together facing the world.

It is forming a circle of love that gathers in the whole family.

It is doing things for each other, not in the attitude of duty or sacrifice, but in the spirit of joy.

It is speaking words of appreciation and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways.

It is not looking for perfection in each other.

It is cultivating flexibility, patience, understanding and a sense of humour.

It is having the capacity to forgive and forget.

It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow.

It is finding room for the things of the spirit.

It is a common search for the good and the beautiful.

It is establishing a relationship in which the independence is equal, dependence is mutual and the obligation is reciprocal.

It is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner.

It is discovering what marriage can be, at its best.

 - Wilferd Peterson

Tags:   happiness  love  marriage  relationships