Happiness Quotes


Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.
– Greg Anderson

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Happiness depends more on how life strikes you than on what happens.
– Andy Rooney

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.
– William Feather

Happiness is a direction, not a place.
– Sydney J. Harris

Caring about the happiness of others we find our own.
– Plato

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
– Pearl S. Buck

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

Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.
– H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

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

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

Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have.
– Unknown

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
– Chuang Tzu
I don't really care how I am remembered as long as I bring happiness and joy to people.
– Eddie Albert
I don't get a sense of American pride. I just get a sense that everyone is here, battling the same thing - that around the world everybody's after the same thing, just some minor piece of happiness each day.
– Paul Thomas Anderson
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
– Guillaume Apollinaire
Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will.
– Saint Thomas Aquinas
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
– Aristotle
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
– Saint Augustine
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
– Jane Austen
Heaven takes care that no man secures happiness by crime.
– Vittorio Alfieri
Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.
– Richard Bach
If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
– Richard Bach
The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.
– Robert Baden-Powell
Lots of people I know have bootlegged tapes of performances and if they play it I will be transported back sometimes with happiness, sometimes with horror.
– Chris Bailey
One's happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
– Hosea Ballou
Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.
– Hosea Ballou
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
– Honore de Balzac
You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren't happy in one place, chances are you won't be happy anyplace.
– Ernie Banks
Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
– John Barrymore
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
– Georges Bataille
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
– Charles Baudelaire
The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.
– Walter Benjamin
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
Happiness is like a cat, If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay not attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.
– William John Bennett
If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?
– Bo Bennett
While we are focusing on fear, worry, or hate, it is not possible for us to be experiencing happiness, enthusiasm or love.
– Bo Bennett
Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
– Ambrose Bierce
A good way I know to find happiness, is to not bore a hole to fit the plug.
– Josh Billings
If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it, as the old woman did her lost spectacles, safe on her own nose all the time.
– Josh Billings
It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.
– Hugo Black
No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.
– Christian Nestell Bovee
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
– Louis D. Brandeis
Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
– Louis D. Brandeis
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 Brown, Jr.
The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
– John Mason Brown
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
– Rita Mae Brown
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
– Pearl S. Buck
Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.
– Edward Bulwer-Lytton
If thou be industrious to procure wealth, be generous in the disposal of it. Man never is so happy as when he giveth happiness unto another.
– Edward Bulwer-Lytton
What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.
– Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
– Edmund Burke
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
– George Burns
Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle.
– George Burns
The secret of happiness is something to do.
– John Burroughs
Worldly wealth is the Devil's bait; and those whose minds feed upon riches recede, in general, from real happiness, in proportion as their stores increase, as the moon, when she is fullest, is farthest from the sun.
– Robert Burton
Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work.
– Joseph Barbara
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
– Thomas Carlyle
Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.
– Dale Carnegie
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping .
– Dale Carnegie
Happiness is your dentist telling you it won't hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.
– Johnny Carson
For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
– Jimmy Carter
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
– Willa Cather
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
– William Ellery Channing
Try to put your happiness before anyone else's, because you may never have done so in your entire life, if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself.
– Margaret Cho
Happiness is a continuation of happenings which are not resisted.
– Deepak Chopra
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
See to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you.
– James Freeman Clarke
In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.
– Jeremy Collier
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
– Charles Caleb Colton
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.
– Charles Caleb Colton
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
Musicians are probably the most uncomfortable people in themselves in the world. Happiness, I think, only exists when you're a child and once you go past 11, unfortunately it's gone.
– Andrea Corr
The day when a sportsman stops thinking above all else of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die.
– Pierre de Coubertin
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
– William Cowper
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
– Quentin Crisp
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
Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.
– William Cobbett
I don't know the true meaning of happiness.
– Jonathan Davis
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
– John Dewey
There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.
– Denis Diderot
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
– Benjamin Disraeli
Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.
– Norman Douglas
Never mind your happiness; do your duty.
– Peter F. Drucker
Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be.
– John Dryden
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
– Alexandre Dumas
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
The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.
– Eleanora Duse
The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.
– Jonathan Edwards
A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?
– Albert Einstein
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
– George Eliot
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
– George Eliot
I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.
– Henry Ellis
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson