quotations about Happiness
Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves--such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The World As I See It
Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
JONATHAN HAIDT
The Happiness Hypothesis
If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.
HUGH BLACK
Happiness
All natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
The journey to true happiness and to happiness now is not a journey of physical distance or time; it is one of personal "self-recovery," where we remember and reconnect consciously to an inner potential for joy--a paradise lost--waiting to be found.
ROBERT HOLDEN
Happiness Now: Timeless Wisdom for Feeling Good Fast
The best recipe for happiness and contentment I've seen is this: dig a big hole in the garden of your thoughts and put into it all your disillusions, disappointments, regrets, worries, troubles, doubts, and fears. Cover well with the earth of fruitfulness. Water it from the well of contentment. Sow on top the seeds of hope, courage, strength, patience, and love. Then when the time for gathering comes, may your harvest be a rich and fruitful one.
ZIG ZIGLAR
Staying Up
Happiness doesn't depend on how much you have to enjoy ... but how much you enjoy what you have!
TOM WILSON
Ziggy, Feb. 2, 1998
We are all travelling to one destination--happiness; but none are going by the same road.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Who would dare speak the word "happiness" in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong? What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?
ALBERT CAMUS
Combat, Dec. 22, 1944
Happiness is not the end result of attaining success, fame or wealth it is the inner joy you experience when you love your work journey, it's here in present moment when you fall in love with the process.
ANKIT SHENDE
Happiness Is Not For Sale
The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Notebooks, Aug. 16, 1916
Happiness is the soul in peace.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
I can at once become happy anywhere, for he is happy who has found himself a happy lot. In a word, happiness lies all in the functions of reason, in warrantable desires and virtuous practice.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Call no man happy till he is dead.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
You've got to be responsible for your own happiness -- you can't expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel.
JULIAN BARNES
Talking It Over
And happiness ... Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one ... What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign -- the divine minus.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
If thou would'st be happy, bring thy mind to thy condition, and have an indifference for more than what is sufficient.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
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