Motivational Quotes

Happiness

I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!

- Louise Bogan

Best Quotes about Happiness

Work and live to serve others, to leave the world a little better than you found it and garner for yourself as much peace of mind as you can. This is happiness.

Sarnoff, David

To buy happiness is to sell soul.

Horton, Doug

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

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

Alda, Alan

Not what you have, but what you see; Not what you see, but what you choose; Not what seems fair, but what is true; Not what you dream, but what you do; Not what you take, but what you give; Not as you pray, but as you live. These are the things that mar or bless The sum of human happiness.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Kundera, Milan

Happiness depends more on how life strikes you than on what happens.

Rooney, Andy

What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

The happy think a lifetime short, but to the unhappy one night can be an eternity.

Lucian

10.

Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.

Peale, Norman Vincent

11.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

Murdoch, Iris

12.

Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Ingersoll, Robert Green

13.

Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe.

Marden, Orison Swett

14.

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

15.

Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.

Jackson, Holbrook

16.

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

Lane, Rose Wilder

17.

When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.

Nicole Kidman

18.

If you pursue happiness you never find it.

Snow, C(harles) P(ercy)

19.

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

Spencer, Herbert

20.

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

Watson, Lilian Eichler

21.

In order to be truly happy, you must live along with, and you must stand for something larger than yourself.

Oprah Winfrey

22.

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

23.

Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again -- this is the brave and happy life.

Buckrose, J.E

24.

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

William Cowper

25.

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.

Mill, John Stuart

26.

And isn't that, at it's core, what the princess fantasy is about for all of us? "Princess" is how we tell little girls that they are special, precious. "Princess" is the wish that we could protect them from pain, that they would never know sorrow, that they will live happily ever after ensconces in lace and innocence.

Peggy Orenstein

27.

Success is getting and achieving what you want. Happiness is wanting and being content with what you get.

Meltzer, Bernard

28.

This is the best kind of voyeurism, hearing joy from your neighbors.

Chuck Sigars

29.

If you're ever given the choice between happiness and intelligence choose happiness

30.

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

Dalai Lama

31.

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us least live so as to deserve it.

Immanuel Hermann Fichte

32.

Happiness is good for the body but sorrow strengthens the spirit.

33.

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

Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier

34.

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

35.

A person will be just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Lincoln, Abraham

36.

People who never achieve happiness are the ones who complain whenever they're awake, and whenever they're asleep, they are thinking about what to complain about tomorrow.

Zimbler, Adam

37.

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.

Thomas Szasz

38.

It's not a question of happiness, it's a requirement. Consider the alternative.

Horton, Doug

39.

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

40.

Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.

Walters, J. Donald

41.

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Schweitzer, Albert

42.

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

43.

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

Jean Jacques Rousseau

44.

What makes people happy is activity; changing evil itself into good by power, working in a God like manner.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Camus, Albert

46.

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.

Barrie, Sir James M.

47.

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.

Strindberg, J. August

48.

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

49.

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

Maslow, Abraham H.

50.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Dewey, John