Quotes about happiness

page 13

“If happiness is the absence of fever then I will never know happiness. For I am posessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation.”

“It is possible to live happily in the here and now. So many conditions of happiness are available—more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more.”

“Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….”

“I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.”

“I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.”

“But to appear happy when I am so miserable — Oh! who can require it?”

“Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”

“As the water pounded on my back, I reflected that I must be pretty simple. It didn't take much to make me happy. A long night with a dead guy had done the trick.”

“A way of life that keeps saying 'Around the next corner, above the next step,' works against the natural order of things and makes it so difficult to be happy and good.”

“And while it is hard enough to take away something that makes a person happy it's even more difficult when it seems like it's the only thing.”

“… I think I know the secret to a long and happy marriage - just choose someone you can't live without.”

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

“They also said she was unconscious and that Valentine wasn’t happy about it. He seems to be waiting for her to wake up.”
“I’d stay unconscious if I were her,” Isabelle muttered.”

“To work with God's happiness bubbling in the soul is to carry a portable paradise within you wherever you go.”

“You know, if you have certain frustrations," Ascanio said, "I would be happy to help you work them out."
Derek looked at me, pointed at Ascanio, and punched his left palm with his right fist a few times. I shook my head.”

“she was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad”

“I don't know that I've ever felt as happy as I did that day, but then again, it was always like that when we were together. I never wanted it to end.”

“The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending--the sad endingsometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually theending.”

“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.”

“My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.”

“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

“The happiness of one's own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one's happiness, the happiness of others.”

“I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That's why it's my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can't it, even if it isn't real.”

“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”

“But of course there's no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons”

“The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.”

“If you make happy those that are near, those that are far will come.”

“She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

“I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

“Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?”

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

“I want to push the fast-forward button until I get back to happy.”

“And if I was humming "Happy Birthday" and smiling stupidly as I fled for my life—well, that was nobody's business, was it?”

“It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”

“Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.”

“Happiest day of my life when my dad made him human. (Devyn)
Happy for you, bonebag…It cost me my girlfriend. (Vik)
It was a lamp, Vik, not a girlfriend. (Devyn)
I really loved that lamp. She lit up my entire world. (Vik)”

“And I wonder how Gage knew this is what my soul has craved. He turns me to face him, his eyes searching. It occurs to me that no one in my life has ever concerned himself so thoroughly with my happiness.”

“I wish you all a long and happy life”

“Sometimes a happy delusion is better than grim reality.”

“There's nothing like a head-strong woman to make you happy to be alive.”

“I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.”

“I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.”

“If Sasha’s threatened, Astrid’s upset. If Astrid’s upset, I’m going to kill whatever’s upsetting her until she’s happy again. (Zarek)”

“… happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release…”

“He is happy, whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent, who can suit his temper to any circumstances.”

“Did anybody tell you that you're a few french fries short of a Happy Meal?”

“Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends… on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.”

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”

“I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.”

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.”

“America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”

“I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.”

“Americans should never come to Europe,' she said, and tried to laugh and began to cry, 'it means they never can be happy again. What's the good of an American who isn't happy? Happiness was all we had.”

“Because I was more often happy for other people, I got to spend more time being happy. And as I saw more light in everybody else, I seemed to have more myself. (250)”

“That word again. Happy. It’s a curse. The pursuit of happiness makes us deeply unhappy. It’s a trap. Before anything else happened, there was me in bed, thinking of who you used to be.
I don’t want you to think I forgot.”

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.”

“I ejaculated about ten minutes ago and the stuff was black. So everything is not normal."

Silence greeted that happy little announcement. Man, if he had hauled off and sucker-punched V, he would have gotten less of a shocked-out reaction.”

“An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is always possible to be happy.”

“Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.”

“What you do in your dreams is never your choice. But it made me happy anyway.”

“She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.”

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.”

“Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”

“Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.”

“I think the only answer is to live life to the fullest while you can and collect memories like fools collect money. Because in the end, that's all you have - happy memories.”

“Sometimes happiness consists of finding the right balance of misery.”

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”

“No--when the rain falls you just let it fall and you grin like a madman and you dance with it, because if you can make yourself happy in the rain then you're doing pretty alright in life. (Nick, page 156)”

“It's not something you tell your single best friend. It'd be like rubbing your nose in the poop of my happiness.”

“I'm so afraid. Because I'm so profoundly happy. Happiness like this is frightening… They only let you this happy if they're preparing to take something from you.”

“I hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life.”

“I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.”

“Complete happiness can look so much like complete terror that its hard to tell them apart.”

“Sunrise

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.”

“I sit there in my bed staring at the wall, feeling happy, enjoying the way the wall looks, how pink and how white it is. Pink and white, as far as I’m concerned, have never looked quite so pink and white before.”

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without the need of protection.”

“If Germans are happy it means everyone else is miserable.”

“I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two… But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.”

“Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.”

“Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.”

“Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.”

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”

“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”

“I suppose now I'm obliged to wish you happiness in your new life. Although happiness in the absence of indoor plumbing is a debatable concept.”

“I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.”

“It is a sad thing to want for happiness, but it is a terrible thing to see another groping about blindly for it, when it is almost within the grasp.”

“… Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.”

“Money can't buy you happiness, but happiness isn't everything.”

“The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' `What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said…. Alaska frowned. `Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.”

“These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.”

“It is impossible to be both selfish and happy”

“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.”

“Happiness is the abscence of the striving for happiness.”

“Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

“Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself”

“It's such a happiness when good people get together.”