Motivational Quotes

Happiness

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

- Landor, Walter Savage

Best Quotes about Happiness

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

Dumas, Alexandre

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

Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications are not your life.

J.K. Rowling

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

Lane, Rose Wilder

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

Jean Houston

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

Horton, Doug

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

Robert Frost

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

Cervantes, Miguel De

10.

He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.

David Nicholls

11.

To buy happiness is to sell soul.

Horton, Doug

12.

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

13.

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

Heywood, John

14.

If you cannot renounce the world the genius of happiness will never salute you.

Prutz

15.

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

16.

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

Smith, Adam

17.

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

18.

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

Rubinstein, Arthur

19.

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

Geneen, Harold S.

20.

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in stranger's gardens.

Jerrold, Douglas William

21.

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.

22.

The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.

Nash, Ogden

23.

A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

24.

Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

Happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult.

Ann Radcliffe

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Byron, Lord

29.

Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer's yes, all's well. That is enough.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Fountain., John

33.

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

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

Rooney, Andy

35.

Happiness seems made to be shared.

Corneille, Pierre

36.

I'm fulfilled in what I do... I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes -- the finer things of life -- would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.

King, Coretta Scott

37.

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

Dalai Lama

38.

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

Oprah Winfrey

39.

The really happy man never laughs -- seldom -- though he may smile. He does not need to laugh, for laughter, like weeping is a relief of mental tension -- and the happy are not over strung.

Aveling, Prof. F. A. P.

40.

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

Landor, Walter Savage

41.

Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.

Levenson, Samuel

42.

In order to have great happiness, you have to have great pain and unhappiness-otherwise how would you know when you're happy?

Caron, Leslie

43.

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

Immanuel Hermann Fichte

44.

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

Addison, Joseph

45.

The smallest annoyances, disturb us the most.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

46.

Where there is joy there is creation. Where there is no joy there is no creation: know the nature of joy.

Upanishads, Veda

47.

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

Greene, Graham

48.

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

49.

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

Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

50.

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