“Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.”

Bliss and happiness
Source: I am That, P.179.

Actually by Stendhal: "La beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur" (Beauty is no more than the promise of happiness), in De L'Amour (1822), chapter 17
Misattributed

Fearless Death: Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying (2012)

Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2010), p. 138.

#104
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Source: The Bluest Eye

Aham Da Asmi

Letter, June 8, 1762 [to an unnamed recipient], p. 103
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Context: Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.