Motivational Quotes

Happiness

We think a happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

- Cicero, Marcus T.

Best Quotes about Happiness

Men expect that religion should cost them no pains, that happiness should drop into their laps without any design and endeavor on their part, and that, after they have done what they please while they live, God should snatch them up to heaven when they die. But though the commandments of God be not grievous, yet it is fit to let men know that they are not thus easy.

Tillotson, John

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

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

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

Byron, Lord

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

Johnson, Samuel

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

Angelis, Barbara De

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

Oprah Winfrey

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

Russell, Bertrand

Happiness is understanding that friendship is more precious than mere things, more precious than getting your own way, more precious than being in situations where true principles are not at stake.

Walters, J. Donald

10.

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

Mahatma Gandhi

11.

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

Epicurus

12.

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.

13.

Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.

Fielding, Henry

14.

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

15.

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

The laws of Manu

16.

IÆve decided that the key to happiness is low expectations.

Laura Moncur

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

Democritus

19.

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

James Oppenheim

20.

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

Saroyan, William

21.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized. It is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

Maurier, Daphne Du

22.

The mintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust, and that real life is love, laughter, and work.

Hubbard, Elbert

23.

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

24.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Aristotle

25.

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

26.

Be open to your happiness and sadness as they arise.

Thomas, John M.

27.

For who is pleased with himself.

Johnson, Samuel

28.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Chuang Tzu

29.

The greatest joy of life is to love and be loved.

Clyde, R.D.

30.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

Russell, Bertrand

31.

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

Watson, Lilian Eichler

32.

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

33.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

34.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Storm Jameson

35.

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

36.

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

Lucian

37.

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

Proust, Marcel

38.

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

Alda, Alan

39.

There's a hope for every woe, and a balm for every pain, but the first joys of our heart come never back again!

Gilfillan, Robert

40.

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

John Berry

41.

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

42.

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

Stein, Ben

43.

Where one is wise two are happy.

Proverb

44.

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

James, William

45.

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

Kin Hubbard

46.

Happiness seems made to be shared.

Corneille, Pierre

47.

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

Bob Newhart

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

Henry David Thoreau