Quotes about happiness

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“it seemed to me that I had never met
another person on earth
as discouraging to my happiness
as my father.
and it appeared that I had
the same effect upon
him.”

“if it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

“The way to achieve happiness is to try for perfection that is impossible to achieve, and spend the rest of your life trying to achieve it.”

“… It makes me cry, I want to talk about something I am not sure I can talk about, I want to talk about the inside from the inside, I do not want to leave it
I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread”

“When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.”

“It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.”

“Then he smiles as if he'd be happy to lie there and gaze at me forever.”

“Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”

“In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the VERY long term, I know which will make better memories.”

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”

“I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it.”

“Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.”

“The only really happy people are those who have learned how to serve.”

“It’s my birthday, Horus insisted. Wish me happy birthday!
“Happy birthday!” I yelled. “Now shut up!”

“Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.”

“Grab it while you can — grab every scrap of happiness while you can”

“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”

“There's nothing happy about having your fate decided for you! You have to grab your own happiness!”

“Everything is perfect on the street again, the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream.”

“Power, wealth and immortality--they don't bring happiness. You will never know what the word means.”

“One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”

“When I encounter a sunrise, a painting, a woman, or an idea that makes my heart bound like a young calf, then I know I am standing in front of happiness.”

“She avoids deep thought like an empty restaurant, not out of stupidity, but a canny resolve to be happy.”

“Happiness isn't wanting what you can get, but wanting what you have.”

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

“I don’t think man was meant to attain happiness so easily. Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.”

“We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky - and it would be so much less fun if we were… There must be the dark background to show up the bright colours.”

“By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.”

“I’d rather be happy and odd than miserable and ordinary,' she said, sticking her chin in the air.”

“We don't go to the ocean for anything as simple as happiness, do we? We
go there to feel alive. Like life, the ocean holds chance and change, grief and terror and beauty. It promises mortality, not peace.”

“Then he thought himself unhappy, but happiness was all in the future; now he felt that the best happiness was already in the past.”

“For me a house or an apartment becomes a home when you add one set of four legs, a happy tail, and that indescribable measure of love that we call a dog.”

“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”

“Different people were good at different things, Lena mused. Lena was good at writing thank-you notes, for instance, and Effie was good at being happy.”

“JB’s mother had taught him early on that appreciated women are happy women.”

“He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”

“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

“True happiness comes not when we get rid of all of our problems, but when we change our relationship to them, when we see our problems as a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice, and to learn.”

“…I said everything that matters… Don't take my advice. Or anyone's advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it's your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you.”

“The banjo is such a happy instrument--you can't play a sad song on the banjo - it always comes out so cheerful.”

“I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or torturous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.”

“A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”

“He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.'
I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?'
'Inside.'
It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.”

“Sometimes when things are particularly bad, my brain will give me a happy dream. […] When I fully awaken, I'm momentarily comforted. I try to hold on to the peaceful feeling of the dream, but it quickly slips away, leaving me sadder than ever.”

“There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.”

“And to the casual observer it looks like I have moved on since I go around wearing my little happy mask all day. I smile and laugh and carry on like my heart's still in one piece, but beneath it all, I am dying.”

“Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental-- that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

“For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.”

“You are not my high school crush, idiot.”
“Great. I can die happy, then.”

“no one dies happy, you can only die well”

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I'm alive, I must live and be happy.”

“How could you love someone and not want them to be happy?”

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”

“Okay, if this is what falling in love feels like, someone please kill me now. (Not literally, overzealous
readers.) But it was all too much—too much emotion, too much happiness, too much longing, perhaps
too much ice cream…”

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“Justice is the only worship.
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now,
The place to be happy is here,
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Wisdom is the science of happiness.”

“There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.”

“Remember, no matter how dark the night, there is always a happy ending. But first, you have to make it through the night.”

“Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing.”

“Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.”

“Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.”

“It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.”

“But if we are truly happy inside, then age brings with it a maturity, a depth, and a power that only magnifies our radiance.”

“When you get up in the morning, you have two choices - either to be happy or to be unhappy. Just choose to be happy”

“I think… the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes… Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for whatmake you happy.”

“If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!”

“But I wasn't happy… when I heard you two had assaulted Castle Macindaw with just thirty men,' [said Halt].
'Thirty-three,' mumbled Horace…
The Ranger gave him a withering look. 'Oh, pardon me… three more men does make a lot of difference.”

“Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn’t have music, I don’t think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn’t have special moments, we would never find music.”

“You'll see, you'll come to understand. These big things, these terrible things, are not the important ones. If they were, how could one go on living? No, it is the small, little things that make up a day, that bring fullness and happiness to a life.”

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

“Cast me into a dungeon;, burn me at the state, crown me king of kings, I can 'pursue happiness' as long as my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

“The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it”

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”

“The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

“I wonder if it's possible to start a new relationship without hurting someone else. I wonder if it's possible to have happiness without it being at someone else's expense”

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

“A happy familiy is but an earlier heaven.”

“There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.”

“It became known that I had a rather fertile imagination, when it came to private activities."
She stared. "What sort of private activities?"
This time he did smile, and it turned his face wicked. "Disrobe, and I'll be happy to demonstrate.”

“I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts”

“My children are so rarely happy. I… I would like to see you be an exception.”

“There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time.”

“I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.”

“That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.”

“I was still hesitant to let myself let go, because I still believed in the fragility of happiness.”

“Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.”

“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

“Many people see happiness only in their future.”

“You make do with what you have. As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have.”

“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”

“Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.”

“Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it.”

“But money or no money we're all searching for the same things aren't we It doesn't matter who you are or how much money you have. Love and happiness that's what it's all about”

“Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there’s nothing to make it last.”

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”

“A sudden happiness catches me unawares. I feel it trickling into me, and my eyes go liquid with gratitude and hope.”

“The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.”

“The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…”