People's Education interview (2007)
Context: Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level — always make them reach out. … If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.
“What I have learned is not to pay much attention to those that say, “Money will not make you happy.” To them, I answer, it’s certainly a good place to start. And not having it can make you sad.”
1985
Related quotes

“Oh, I wouldn't say Love always makes you happy. Sometimes it makes you incredibly sad.”
Source: The House of Hades
Source: Notes of Thought (1883), p. 147

“You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.”
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.”
Source: Missing Kissinger

interview with KRNO, 2010-07-14
Angle: Unemployed are "Spoiled"; It's not my job to fight for Nevadans' jobs
2010-06-18
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK-YtM52aPE
2010-10-23
on unemployment benefits

1860s
Context: In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.
Letter to Fanny McCullough (23 December 1862); Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler

“What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?”
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover