HAPPINESS QUOTES VIII

quotations about Happiness

The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearnings after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Characteristics


Your happiness is a one person job -- it begins and ends with you.

JONATHAN LOCKWOOD HUIE

100 Secrets for Living a Life You Love


Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

ARNOLD BENNETT

Self and Self-Management

Tags: Arnold Bennett


The broader unquestioned premises upon which my own culture founded its view of the human condition, such as the one that Unhappiness is as legitimate a part of experience as happiness and necessary in order to render happiness appreciable, or that it is more advantageous to be young than to be old: those still took me a long time to pry loose for reexamination.

JEAN LIEDLOFF

The Continuum Concept


Happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot


A man may be happy anywhere that knows how to be contented.

WELLINS CALCOTT

Thoughts Moral and Divine


I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Mosquitoes


Happiness has been so degraded by its identification with well-feeling that one can appear spiritually callous in rising to its defense. Some of the prophets who warned against the pursuit of psychological happiness have been made welcome, even if their warnings were not heeded for long. One has only to draw a line from Augustine through Luther and Pascal, to Kant and Kierkegaard, to Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth to be reminded of how much respect this dismissal has been afforded. They are heralded for their tough stance against worldliness and an unwillingness to conform to the spirit of the age. In short, they refused to be assimilated for the sake of temporal fulfillment.

DEAL WYATT HUDSON

Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction


Men of warm imaginations and towering thoughts are apt to overlook the goods of fortune which are near them, for something that glitters in the sight at a distance; to neglect solid and substantial happiness for what is showy and superficial; and to contemn that good which lies within their reach, for that which they are not capable of attaining. Hope calculates its schemes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin, and dishonour.

JOSEPH ADDISON

The Spectator, Nov. 13, 1712


Do you know what I think happiness is really? Lookin' forward.

JOHN HARTLEY MANNERS

Happiness and Other Plays


My friends' happiness forms part of my own.

PEDRO ALEXIS TABENSKY

Happiness: Personhood


Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.

ROBERT ANTHONY

attributed, The Graduate's Book of Practical Wisdom


Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul.

VOLTAIRE

A Philosophical Dictionary


Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

OSCAR LEVANT

attributed, TIME Magazine, August 28, 1972


Happiness can come in a single moment. And in a single moment it can go again. But a single moment does not create it. Happiness is created through countless choices made and then made again throughout a lifetime. You are its host as well as its guest. You give it form, shape, individuality, texture, tone. And what it allows you to give can change your world. Happiness can be stillness. But it isn't still. It wraps, enchants, heals, consoles, soothes, delights, calms, inspires and connects. It is on your face and in your body. It is in your life and being.

STEPHANIE DOWRICK

Choosing Happiness


Much too oft we make life gloomy--
When happy we might be,
If we gathered more of sunshine,
And not dark shadows see.

ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, Thoughts


The happiness of life, like the light of day, consists not in one brilliant flash, but in a series of mild, serene rays.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust


In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say "I have learned" and "I have loved," you will also be able to say "I have been happy."

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Rama II


If you ask a man how he is, he searches himself to find a pain to report. If he has nothing but happiness he hates to mention it, and says, "Oh, not half bad."

FRANK CRANE

"Hidden Happiness", Four Minute Essays


I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me.

JEAN ANOUILH

Antigone