Happy quotes
page 3
Attributed to John Stuart Mill in The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, Vol. LXXXV (September 1887), p. 170
Disputed
1890s
Source: Candida, Act I (1898)
“Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
Commonly attributed, but source unknown. note: Uncertain
“And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.”
Daily Telegram #1172, Will Rogers Sees No Value In All The Time We Save (28 April 1930)
Daily telegrams
Source: What I Know For Sure
“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
No known source in Emerson's works; first found as a piece of anonymous folk-wisdom in a 1936 newspaper column:
: Every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness.
:* Junius, "Office Cat" https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/85995624/, The Daily Freeman [Kingston, NY] (30 December 1936), p. 6
Misattributed
“Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway”
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
“You can do anything, but not everything.”
“Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure”
“Life is very interesting… in the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths.”
Variant: In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths.
“The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.”
“You seek problems because you need their gifts.”
Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
“Happiness, not in another place but this place… not for another hour, but this hour.”
“One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.”
“Very little is needed to make a happy life.”
ἐν ὀλιγίστοις κεῖται τὸ εὐδαιμόνως βιῶσαι
VII, 67
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”
“Live for each second without hesitation”
“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it.”
Source: Letter to My Daughter
“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”
13 August 1846
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet
The Second World War, Volume II : Their Finest Hour (1949) Chapter 8 (September Tensions).
Post-war years (1945–1955)
“Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved.”
Oh, the Places You'll Go! (1990)
Source: Oh, The Places You'll Go!
“If you only have one smile in you, give it to the people you love.”
“The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
Source: Moulin Rouge!: The Splendid Book That Charts the Journey of Baz Luhrmann's Motion Picture
“If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.”
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding
“Success is getting what you want.
Happiness is wanting what you get.”
“The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.”
Source: Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad,. Northern women development. [Nigeria]. p, 351. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657.
“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
“Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value.”
“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief”
“It is only possible to live happily ever after on a daily basis.”
“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
“To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness.”
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago
It Takes A Village, January 1996
White House years (1993–2000)
“T is what you will,—or will be what you would.”
First Week, Third Day.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)
Nine Stories (1953), De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period (1952)
“The business of business is business.”
Widely attributed to Milton Friedman, and sometimes cited as being in his work Capitalism and Freedom (1962) this is also attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, sometimes with citation of a statement of 1964, but sometimes with attestations to his use of it as a motto as early as 1923.
Disputed
“Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Variant on aphorism "Study as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow" pre-dating Gandhi, variously attributed to Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636), in FPA Book of Quotations (1952) by Franklin Pierce Adams, to Edmund Rich (1175–1240) in American Journal of Education (1877), or to Alain de Lille in Samuel Smiles's Duty https://books.google.com/books?id=33UzAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA363&dq=live+die+tomorrow+learn+forever&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjd3s_2m57MAhWFMGMKHe-sAl8Q6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=live%20die%20tomorrow%20learn%20forever&f=false (1881).
The 1995 book "The good boatman: a portrait of Gandhi," states that Gandhi subscribed "to the view that a man should live thinking he might die tomorrow but learn as if he would live forever."
In his 2010 Boyer lecture Glyn Davis (Professor of Political Science and Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University) attributes the quote to Desiderius Erasmus. "He [Erasmus] reworked Pliny to urge 'live as if you are to die tomorrow, study as if you were to live forever'. Many students obey the first clause - the best heed both."
There is a similar quote by Johann Gottfried Herder: "Mensch, genieße dein Leben, als müssest morgen du weggehn; Schone dein Leben, als ob ewig du weiletest hier." ["Man, enjoy your life as if you were to depart tomorrow; spare your life as if you were to linger here forever."] (Zerstreute Blätter, 1785).
Disputed
Not a Kerouac quote, but by the Indian spiritual leader, Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007).
Misattributed
“Happiness and Beauty are by-products.”
#102
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)
“If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.”
As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, Steve Deger and Leslie Ann Gibson, p. 279
According to The Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/17/butterfly/, "the earliest instance of this saying was crafted by the enigmatic “L” for “The Daily Crescent” newspaper in New Orleans [in June 1848]. ... The linkage to Henry David Thoreau is unsupported."
Misattributed
“Where there is the will, we can make it.”
Jiang Yi-huah (2014) cited in " Jiang seeks to boost tourism numbers to 10 million http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/01/03/2003580395" on Taipei Times, 3 January 2014
“There was content, but no container.”
Source: Think (1999), Chapter Four, The Self, p. 135
“Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.”
Haven (1951)
“The business of business is business.”
Widely attributed to Friedman, and sometimes cited as being in his work Capitalism and Freedom (1962) this is also attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, sometimes with citation of a statement of 1964, but sometimes with attestations to his use of it as a motto as early as 1923.
Disputed
Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (1954), by Louis Fischer, p. 177
Mahatma Gandhi to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, August 29, 1947 https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/ghp_booksection_detail/Ny0yMzUtMg==#page/258/mode/2up. In Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. 1st edition (April, 1961), p. 246
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)
2000s
Source: Nelson Mandela on determination, From a letter to Makhaya Ntini on his 100th Cricket Test (17 December 2009). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes
1963, Address at the Free University of Berlin
“The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.”
Part 5, XXXVII
Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)
“There is no knowledge that is not power.”
Old Age
1870s, Society and Solitude (1870)
“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”
Attributed in The Life You Were Born to Live : Finding Your Life Purpose (1995) by Dan Millman, Pt. 2, Ch. 2 : Cooperation and Balance
Disputed
Widely quoted as an Addison maxim this is actually by the American clergyman George Washington Burnap (1802-1859), published in Burnap's The Sphere and Duties of Woman : A Course of Lectures (1848), Lecture IV.
Misattributed
This is presented as a statement of 1877, as quoted in From Telegraph to Light Bulb with Thomas Edison (2007) by Deborah Headstrom-Page, p. 22.
1800s
“Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow.”
They Call Me Coach (1972)
“The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”
The Way You Wear Your Hat (1997)
“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.”
Attributed to Confucius in Out of the Blue: Delight Comes Into Our Lives (1996) by Mark Victor Hansen, Barbara Nichols, and Patty Hansen, p. 93
Attributed
“All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.”
Tota felicitas aut infelicitas in hoc solo sita est; videlicet in qualitate obiecti, cui adhaeremus amore.
I, 9; translation by W. Hale White (Revised by Amelia Hutchison Stirling)
On the Improvement of the Understanding (1662)
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Section 280 http://books.google.com/books?id=msOwAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+search+for+happiness+is+one+of+the+chief+sources+of+unhappiness%22&pg=PA151#v=onepage
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Words of the Prophet: Forget Yourself and Serve, New Era, Jul 2006, 2–5.
“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
As quoted in Meditations for Living In Balance: Daily Solutions for People Who Do Too Much (2000) by Anne Wilson Schaef, p. 11.
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785)
“There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.”
The source is likely to be either modern Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, or Calvinist clergyman Abraham Johannes Muste. The phrase appears in Thich Nhat Hanh's writings; but it also appears in a volume of US senate hearings from 1948, when Thich Nhat Hanh had not yet been ordained as a monk. Muste is known to have used a variant of the phrase – "'peace' is the way" in 1967, but this was not the first time he had used it, and he had a connection with the 1948 hearing.
Misattributed
“Happiness is not the absence of problems; it's the ability to deal with them.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 64
“The grand essentials of life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for”
actually a quote from The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures by George Washington Burnap (1848) (p.99 Lecture IV)
Misattributed
1851
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
Context: 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. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
“The self is a center of relationships.”
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The point is not merely that human relationships are fulfilling; the Confucian claim runs deeper than that. It is rather that apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.
“Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.”
“Be happy. It really annoys negative people.”
From The Teaching of Buddha http://www.bdk.or.jp/english/about/popularization/buddhist-scriptures.html, by Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), Pg 132. It is a paraphrased version of Section 10 of the Sutra of Forty-two Sections
Unclassified
“To be and not to be, that is the answer.”
This witticism derived from William Shakespeare's line "To be or not to be; that is the question" in Hamlet, has sometimes been attributed to Hein, but also to many others. The earliest occurrence so far located in research for Wikiquote was published in A Calendar of Doubts and Faiths (1930) by William Marias Malisoff.
Misattributed