Happy quotes

Attributed on the internet but not found in print prior to an attribution in Aero Digest, Vols. 58–59, 1949, p. 115 https://books.google.com/books?id=q2ofAQAAMAAJ&amp;dq=%22Life+is+simple%22+but+we+insist+on+making+it+complicated&amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;q=%22Life+is+simple%22+ <br class="br">Misattributed, Not Chinese

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.

Letter (September 1940)

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

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.

1979

Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)

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

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&#x27;s children&#x27;s home in Calcutta, India, and have sometimes become misattributed to her. The version posted at his site http://www.paradoxicalcommandments.com begins: <br class="br">Misattributed <br class="br">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.

We Bereaved (1929)

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

Letter to his son Eduard (5 February 1930), as quoted in Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), p. 367
1930s

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/

Attributed quotes

Source: Pygmalion

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

Source: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations - 1841-1844

As quoted in Meditations for Women Who Do Too (1991) by Anne Wilson Schaef

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Aphorism #33
Interglacial (2004)

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

Source: The Diary of Anne Frank

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&amp;q=%22problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. In the 1948 The Hibbert Journal: Volumes 46-47 the quote is referred to as &quot;the famous Kierkegaardian slogan&quot; on p. 237 http://books.google.com/books?id=UuDRAAAAMAAJ&amp;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 &quot;The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved; it is a reality to be experienced&quot; which appeared in the 1928 book The Conquest of Illusion by Jacobus Johannes Leeuw, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=OFdVAAAAMAAJ&amp;q=%22not+a+problem+to+be+solved%22#search_anchor. <br class="br">Misattributed

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

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

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

Source: Zorba the Greek

Source: The Alchemist

ii. America: The Pueblo Indians http://books.google.com/books?id=w6vUgN16x6EC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=Jung+Memories+Dreams+and+Reflections&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=LLxKUcD0NfSo4APh0oDABg&amp;ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false (Extract from an unpublished ms) (Random House Digital, 2011). <br class="br">Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) <br class="br">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.<br><br>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...

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

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

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

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

"The Art of Living", interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960
Variant: [T]here are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. 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.

March 11, 1856
Journals (1838-1859)

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

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

Disputed <br class="br">Variant: No one can make you feel inferior without your permission. <br class="br">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 &quot;Bartlett&#x27;s and other sources say her famous quotation can be found in This is My Story, Roosevelt&#x27;s 1937 autobiography. It can&#x27;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/.

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.

"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)

Context: It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.

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.

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

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Variant: People see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is and the future less resolved than it’ll be.

The Fall (1956)

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Harvard address (2008)

"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."

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