Quotes

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
-Mark Twain

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

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
-Frederick Keonig

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
-Bernard de Fontenelle

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
-Sigmund Freud

Cheerfulness is what greases the axles of the world. Don't go through life creaking.
-H.W. Byles

We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.
-Mignon McLaughlin

Happiness is... Usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
-Thomas Szasz

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

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
-Douglas Jerrold

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
-John Stuart Mill

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
-Robert Brault

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
-Guilaume Apollinaire

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
-Charles Caleb Colton

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

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

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-Abraham Lincoln

Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.
-Janet Lane

Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
-Yevgeny Zamyatin

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
-Salvador Dali

What I'm looking for is a blessing that's not in disguise.
-Kitty O'Neill Collins

The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.
-Joseph Roux

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
-Niccolo Machiavelli

One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
-Eugene O'Neill

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
-Don Herold

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-Joseph Addison

In order to have great happiness you have to have great pain and unhappiness - otherwise how would you know when you're happy?
-Leslie Caron

When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.
-Sophocles

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
-Epictetus

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
-Jacques Prevert

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

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.
-Frank McKinney

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
-Jean de La Bruyere

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
-Dalai Lama

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
-Henry Ward Beecher

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
-Bertrand Russell

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy.
-William Shakespeare

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.
-Andrew Delbanco

You cannot always have happiness, but you can always give happiness.
-Anonymous Author

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
-William Saroyan

It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely.
-Georges Duhamel

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
-Samuel Johnson

On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
-William R. Inge

Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.
-Mignon McLaughlin

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

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

Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other. When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.
-Hazelmarie Elliott

Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
-Christian Nestell Bovee

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
-Lady Blessington

If you search the world for happiness, you may find it in the end, for the world is round and will lead you back to your door.
-Robert Brault

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
-Doug Larson

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.
-John Stuart Mill

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
-Iris Murdoch

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
-Ernest Dimnet

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.
-Anton Chekhov

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
-Maxim Gorky

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
-Freya Stark

I hate being happy. It pisses me off. Because I know if I try to grab it, it will slip away, like one of those goddamn water snakes. And I hate just looking. I always try to grab.
-D.H. Mondfleur

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
-Hosea Ballou