Motivational Quotes

Happiness

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

- Santayana, George

Best Quotes about Happiness

What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

Oliphant, Margaret

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

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

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

We are no longer happy as soon as we wish to be happier.

Landor, Walter Savage

In order for people to be happy, sometimes they have to take risks. It's true these risks can put them in danger of being hurt.

Meg Cabot

The hardest habit of all to break is the terrible habit of happiness.

Garrison, Theodosia

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

Thoreau, Henry David

The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

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

12.

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

Knuth, Don

13.

Depend not on another, but lean instead on thyself...True happiness is born of self-reliance.

The laws of Manu

14.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

The secret to happiness is not in doing what one likes to do, but in liking what one has to do.

16.

The loss of wealth is loss of dirt, as sages in all times assert; The happy man's without a shirt.

Heywood, John

17.

Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters -- where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be. If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness.

Erikson, Erik H.

18.

Sir, that 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.

Johnson, Samuel

19.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Russell, Bertrand

20.

Remember, happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think.

Carnegie, Dale

21.

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.

Proverb, Scottish

22.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

23.

To buy happiness is to sell soul.

Horton, Doug

24.

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

25.

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

Szasz, Thomas

26.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Kundera, Milan

27.

Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.

Schachtel, Rabbi H.

28.

Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.

Goodman, Roy

29.

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

Oppenheimer, Julius Robert

30.

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

Addison, Joseph

31.

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

32.

There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow.

Brande, Dorothea

33.

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

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

34.

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

35.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Santayana, George

36.

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. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.

Jung, Carl

37.

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

Smith, Adam

38.

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

39.

Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.

Rubinstein, Arthur

40.

If you pursue happiness you never find it.

Snow, C(harles) P(ercy)

41.

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

Lucian

42.

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

43.

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

Horton, Doug

44.

It is kind of happiness to know to what extent we may be unhappy.

45.

Do you want my one-word secret of happiness -- It's growth -- mental, financial, you name it.

Geneen, Harold S.

46.

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

Lao-Tzu

47.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky.

Solon

49.

Happiness is a sunbeam which may pass through a thousand bosoms without losing a particle of its original ray; nay, when it strikes on a kindred heart, like the converged light on a mirror, it reflects itself with redoubled brightness. It is not perfected till it is shared.

Porter, Jane

50.

All I can say about life is, Oh God, enjoy it!

Bob Newhart