Quotations: Happiness

Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.
Anon

The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make.
Aristotle

...happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it...
Aristotle

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Jane Austen

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
John Barrymore

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
Edward de Bono

Money doesn't always bring happiness. People with ten million dollars are no happier than people with nine million dollars.
Hobart Brown

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.
Hobart Brown

We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice and prejudice.
Jean de La Bruyere

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Herman Cain

The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Allan K. Chalmers

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
Robertson Davies

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
Benjamin Disraeli

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.
Albert Einstein

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
William Feather

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

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Robert Frost

All supposedly 'selfless' acts are entirely selfish. When a man gives to charity, rest assured he values the happiness it brings him more than the money itself. If he did not, he would not give away his money!
James Halloran

Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.
Burton Hills

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
Francis Hutcheson

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

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Aldous Huxley

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part.
Washington Irving

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
Helen Keller

Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
E.L. Konigsburg

To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz

Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
Cynthia Nelms

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing--that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism: The weak and the failures shall perish. They ought even to be helped to perish.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
James Openheim

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.
Norm Papernick

The road to happiness lies in two simple principles; find what interests you and that you can do well, and put your whole soul into it - every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.
John D. Rockefeller

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
Leo Rosten

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
Leo Rosten

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.
Bertrand Russell

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
Bertrand Russell

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved...
George Sand

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Albert Schweitzer

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
C. P. Snow

I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
Martha Washington

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
Edith Wharton

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde

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