Motivational Quotes

Happiness

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

Best Quotes about Happiness

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

Knuth, Don

Happy were men if they but understood There is no safety but in doing good

Fountain., John

Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are able to inspire.

Prazlin, Duchess

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Fielding, Henry

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

The secret of happiness is to make others believe they are the cause of it.

Al Batt

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

10.

We take greater pains to persuade others we are happy than in trying to think so ourselves.

Confucius

11.

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

George Burns

12.

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

Hubbard, Elbert

13.

If you want to be happy for a year, plant a garden; If you want to be happy for life, plant a tree.

Proverb, English

14.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Chuang Tzu

15.

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

16.

Call no man unhappy until he is married.

Socrates

17.

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

18.

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

19.

If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn't be a human being, you'd be a game show host.

Heatter, Gabriel

20.

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

Henry David Thoreau

21.

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

22.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Storm Jameson

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant

28.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

29.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

Epictetus

30.

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

William Cowper

31.

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

Happiness is perfume, you can't pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself

Zee, James Van Der

33.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

Beckett, Samuel

34.

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

Huxley, Aldous

36.

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson

37.

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

Carnegie, Dale

38.

Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.

Lucas, E. V.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Happiness is the act of being tough with ourselves and tender with others.

43.

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.

Downs, Hugh

44.

To buy happiness is to sell soul.

Horton, Doug

45.

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

Richter, Jean Paul