Happy quotes

Letter (September 1940)

Variant: Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

Variant: When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

This is a variant or paraphrase of The Paradoxical Commandments, by Kent M. Keith, student activist, first composed in 1968 as part of a booklet for student leaders, which had hung on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta, India, and have sometimes become misattributed to her. The version posted at his site http://www.paradoxicalcommandments.com begins:
Misattributed
Context: People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.

Variant: Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, and others make it happen.

Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870)
Variant: Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Variant of this quote "The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer somebody else up." is misattributed to Albert Einstein.
Source: According Quote Investigator Mark Twain did write a version of this saying in a personal notebook in 1896, and it was published by 1935 in “Mark Twain’s Notebook”. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/21/cheer-somebody/

Variant: The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.

Variant: Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living out fears.

1979

Variant: Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

Source: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), p. 237. Part 8 : How I Conquered Worry,

Source: Zorba the Greek

We Bereaved (1929)

"Jubal Harshaw" in the first edition (1961); the later 1991 "Uncut" edition didn't have this line, because it was one Heinlein had added when he went through and trimmed the originally submitted manuscript on which the "Uncut" edition is based. Heinlein also later used a variant of this in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where he has Xia quote Harshaw: "Dr. Harshaw says that 'the word "love" designates a subjective condition in which the welfare and happiness of another person are essential to one's own happiness.'"
Source: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961; 1991)

Shared on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MayaAngelou/posts/10150251846629796, July 4, 2011

ii. America: The Pueblo Indians http://books.google.com/books?id=w6vUgN16x6EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jung+Memories+Dreams+and+Reflections&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LLxKUcD0NfSo4APh0oDABg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011).
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)
Context: We always require an outside point to stand on, in order to apply the lever of criticism. This is especially so in psychology, where by the nature of the material we are much more subjectively involved than in any other science. How, for example, can we become conscious of national peculiarities if we have never had the opportunity to regard our own nation from outside? Regarding it from outside means regarding it from the standpoint of another nation. To do so, we must acquire sufficient knowledge of the foreign collective psyche, and in the course of this process of assimilation we encounter all those incompatibilities which constitute the national bias and the national peculiarity. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. I understand England only when I see where I, as a Swiss, do not fit in. I understand Europe, our greatest problem, only when I see where I as a European do not fit into the world. Through my acquaintance with many Americans, and my trips to and in America, I have obtained an enormous amount of insight into the European character; it has always seemed to me that there can be nothing more useful for a European than some time or another to look out at Europe from the top of a skyscraper. When I contemplated for the first time the European spectacle from the Sahara, surrounded by a civilization which has more or less the same relationship to ours as Roman antiquity has to modem times, I became aware of how completely, even in America, I was still caught up and imprisoned in the cultural consciousness of the white man. The desire then grew in me to carry the historical comparisons still farther by descending to a still lower cultural level.

On my next trip to the United States I went with a group of American friends to visit the Indians of New Mexico, the city-building Pueblos...

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Source: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

Attributed quotes

Source: "Intuitions" (October 1932), published in Youthful Writings (1976)

Source: The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

Source: The Diary of Anne Frank

Marita in Ch. 11
Source: The Garden of Eden (1986)

Attributed to Kierkegaard in a number of books, the earliest located on Google Books being the 1976 book Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism by Robert A. Hipkiss, p. 83 http://books.google.com/books?id=g_JaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. In the 1948 The Hibbert Journal: Volumes 46-47 the quote is referred to as "the famous Kierkegaardian slogan" on p. 237 http://books.google.com/books?id=UuDRAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the+famous+Kierkegaardian+slogan+life+is+not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor, which may be intended to suggest the phrase is Kierkegaard-esque rather than being something written by Kierkegaard. In reality this seems to be a slightly altered version of the quote "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced" which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor.
Misattributed

"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)

Cynthia's Revels (1600), Act III, scene ii

Source: The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Variant: The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Source: Meditations

"Security" (1951); excerpted in Outlaw Journalist: The Life & Times of Hunter S. Thompson (2008), page 15
1950s

Disputed
Variant: No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Source: Sometimes claimed to appear in her book This is My Story, but in The Quote Verifier by Ralph Keyes (2006), Keyes writes on p. 97 that "Bartlett's and other sources say her famous quotation can be found in This is My Story, Roosevelt's 1937 autobiography. It can't. Quotographer Rosalie Maggio scoured that book and many others by and about Roosevelt in search of this line, without success. In their own extensive searching, archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, have not been able to find the quotation in This Is My Story or any other writing by the First Lady. A discussion of some of the earliest known attributions of this quote to Roosevelt, which may be a paraphrase from an interview, can be found in this entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/30/not-inferior/.

The Journey's Echo (1963), p. 161 https://books.google.com/books?id=xlFbAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22There+can+be+no+happiness+if+the+things+we+believe+in+are+different+from+the+things+we+do.%22.

Variant: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.
Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 95
Context: Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

Title of poem (1942)
1940s

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Variant: Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

Variant: Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

Source: When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball's Greatest Heroes

As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs, p. 251

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

As quoted in Weird Ideas That Work : 11 1/2 practices for promoting, managing, and sustaining innovation (2001) by Robert I. Sutton, p. 95

The Fall (1956)

from New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea (1946); as quoted in Style and Idea (1985), p. 124
1940s

Manuscript, Sermons; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 350.

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity. He who seeks it elsewhere will not find it for, having drunk from all the glasses of life, he will find satisfaction only in those.

"Nature Boy" (1948)
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is to love and be loved, just to love and be loved.
His assertion to Joe Romersa, of how his lyrics should be corrected, saying that "To be loved in return, is too much of a deal, and that has nothing to do with love."
Context: While we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me:
"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return."

The Lion and the Mouse.
Variant: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

Variant: It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People