Motivational Quotes

Happiness

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

- Bono, Edward De

Best Quotes about Happiness

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

Proust, Marcel

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

Knuth, Don

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.

Douglas, Norman

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Addison, Joseph

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Stendhal, Henri B.

The biggest lie on the planet: When I get what I want, I will be happy.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid the happiness of others.

David Assael

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Johnson, Samuel

The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

10.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

Yeats, William Butler

11.

That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes.

Waitley, Denis

12.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

George Burns

13.

A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Russell, Bertrand

15.

Happiness radiates like the fragrance from a flower, and draws all good things toward you. Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others. Do not strain after the needs of life. It is sufficient to be quietly alert and aware of them. In this way life proceeds more naturally and effortlessly. Life is here to Enjoy!

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

16.

The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy.

Stein, Ben

17.

The 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.

Aurelius, Marcus

18.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

19.

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

Lane, Rose Wilder

20.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.

Camus, Albert

21.

You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.

Horace

22.

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?

Smith, Adam

23.

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.

C. P. Snow

24.

Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.

Alcott, Louisa May

25.

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart

26.

Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of unhappiness.

Lao-Tzu

27.

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

28.

To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.

Byron, Lord

29.

Happiness is a by product of an effort to make someone else happy.

Palmer, Gretta Brooker

30.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means -- either may do -- the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

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

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier

32.

Happiness is not in having being; it is in doing.

Watson, Lilian Eichler

33.

The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

Jonathan Haidt

34.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

35.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

Russell, Bertrand

36.

All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.

Boone, Daniel

37.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a person and life they lead.

Camus, Albert

38.

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.

Black, Hugo

39.

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

Mahatma Gandhi

40.

Let no one till his death be called unhappy. Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.

John Berry

42.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Huxley, Aldous

43.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

44.

Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics.

Heinlein, Robert

45.

Not only is there a right to be happy, there is a duty to be happy. So much sadness exists in the world that we are all under obligation to contribute as much joy as lies within our powers.

Bonnell, John S.

46.

The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

47.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.

James Oppenheim

48.

The really happy man never laughs -- seldom -- though he may smile. He does not need to laugh, for laughter, like weeping is a relief of mental tension -- and the happy are not over strung.

Aveling, Prof. F. A. P.

49.

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Bergson, Henri L.

50.

If frugality were established in the state, and if our expenses were laid out to meet needs rather than superfluities of life, there might be fewer wants, and even fewer pleasures, but infinitely more happiness.

Goldsmith, Oliver