Motivational Quotes

Happiness

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

- Dalai Lama

Best Quotes about Happiness

The creed of a true saint is to make the best of life, and to make the most of it.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

Bennett, Arnold

Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

Hazlitt, William

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.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

Yeats, William Butler

After what we can say you can be sure the happy heart will make the happy day.

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

10.

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

Seneca

11.

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

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

12.

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation.

Freud, Sigmund

13.

Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. It will not keep; it cannot be accumulated; nor have we got to go out of ourselves or into remote places to gather it, since it has rained down from a Heaven, at our very door

Edwards, Tryon

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Joy comes from using your potential.

Schultz, Will

17.

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

18.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Robert Frost

19.

It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.

Waitley, Denis

20.

Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul.

Democritus

21.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

Kingsley, Charles

22.

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

23.

My happiness derives from knowing the people I love are happy.

Ketchel, Holly

24.

Happiness... she loves, to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self sacrifice. She will be found not in places but lurking in cornfields and factories; and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.

Grayson, David

25.

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

George Burns

26.

Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.

Rubin, Theodore I.

27.

Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.

Stossel, John

28.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

Dalai Lama

29.

He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness -- the sense that is where we really belong.

Greene, Graham

30.

Many people have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Keller, Helen

31.

Joy descends gently upon us like the evening dew, and does not patter down like a hailstorm.

Richter, Jean Paul

32.

Happiness consists in activity -- it is a running stream, not a stagnant pool.

Mason, John L.

33.

We find greatest joy, not in getting, but in expressing what we are. Men do not really live for honors or for pay; their gladness is not the taking and holding, but in doing, the striving, the building, the living. It is a higher joy to teach than to be taught. It is good to get justice, but better to do it; fun to have things but more to make them. The happy man is he who lives the life of love, not for the honors it may bring, but for the life itself.

Baughan, R.J.

34.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

Russell, Bertrand

35.

There is no end of craving. Hence contentment alone is the best way to happiness. Therefore, acquire contentment.

Sivananda, Sri Swami

36.

Happiness is activity.

Aristotle

37.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

Jean Houston

39.

Happiness seems made to be shared.

Corneille, Pierre

40.

The secret of happiness is something to do.

Burroughs, John

41.

Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.

Anderson, Greg

42.

IÆve decided that the key to happiness is low expectations.

Laura Moncur

43.

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.

Camus, Albert

44.

No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.

Tozer, A. W.

45.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness

Orwell, George

46.

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

Muggeridge, Malcolm

47.

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

Byron, Lord

48.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

Jonathan Haidt

49.

Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained; most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.

Spencer, Herbert

50.

Happiness consists of three things; Someone to love, work to do, and a clear conscience.