Quotes about: happiness

Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb-twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one's powers and talents.
– John W. Gardner
Do you want my one-word secret of happiness - It's growth - mental, financial, you name it.
– Harold S. Geneen
I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.
– Edward Gibbon
Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessors of happiness.
– Andre Gide
Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
– Andre Gide
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
– Andre Gide
Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to hunt for happiness.
– William E. Gladstone
Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.
– William E. Gladstone
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The highest happiness of man is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Happiness consists in activity. It is a running steam, not a stagnant pool.
– John Mason Good
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
Happiness is realizing that nothing is too important.
– Antonio Gala
Men who love humanity have all dreamed at least once during their lives of bringing all their fellow men together in a state of carefree happiness. And only the world of the theater ever really succeeds in doing this.
– Jean Jacques Gautier
The happiness of the drop is to die in the river.
– Al Ghazali
The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.
– Olivia Goldsmith
Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the role emotions play in our lives. Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life, including family relationships.
– John Gottman
Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
– Robert Grudin
All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.
– John Gunther
The happiness of every country depends upon the character of its people, rather than the form of its government.
– Thomas Chandler Haliburton
The sexes were made for each other, and only in the wise and loving union of the two is the fullness of health and duty and happiness to be expected.
– William Hall
To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?
– Christopher Hampton
The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.
– Harry Harrison
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.
– Robert A. Heinlein
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
– Ernest Hemingway
In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
– Ernest Hemingway
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
– Ernest Hemingway
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
– Heraclitus
It takes great wit and interest and energy to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a great activity. One must be open and alive. It is the greatest feat man has to accomplish.
– Robert Herrick
Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.
– Napoleon Hill
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
– Eric Hoffer
Happiness consists in activity. It is running steam, not a stagnant pool.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is even a happiness - that makes the heart afraid.
– Thomas Hood
When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things - not the great occasions - that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness.
– Bob Hope
You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.
– Horace
Character is power; it makes friends, draws patronage and support and opens the way to wealth, honor and happiness.
– John Howe
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
– Langston Hughes
I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
The groundwork of all happiness is health.
– Leigh Hunt
My desire is to usher in an unprecedented period of cooperation and community building. People reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic - a state that is truly respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must be our hope.
– Jon Huntsman, Jr.
Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot little puppies.
– Gene Hill
For me, the most memorable adventures are still the perils that we face daily in life and love, from the mundane to the meaningful. Where the comedy is often at our own expense, but where the drama, even if painful, reminds us that we are living and feeling here in the real time, with the ever-recurring possibility that this latest chapter will end with new understanding, hope and perhaps even happiness.
– Rupert Holmes
The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.
– Winifred Holtby
Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.
– Anthony Hopkins
The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
– William Dean Howells
It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
– Frank McKinney Hubbard
That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
– Francis Hutcheson
Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness.
– Henrik Ibsen
I had millions of dollars, all of the material things that anybody could want, but I just couldn't find happiness. And I would have gave it all back, if I could go back in time and sign that thirty thousand dollar contract with Def Jam, just to have my credibility and to not be the butt end of a lot of jokes.
– Vanilla Ice
Strength is Happiness. Strength is itself victory. In weakness and cowardice there is no happiness. When you wage a struggle, you might win or you might lose. But regardless of the short-term outcome, the very fact of your continuing to struggle is proof of your victory as a human being.
– Daisaku Ikeda
Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
– Robert Green Ingersoll
Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.
– Robert Green Ingersoll
Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.
– Holbrook Jackson
Contentment, in Telephone Ad-land, is a conversation, and happiness is a warm receiver.
– Hayes B. Jacobs
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
– Douglas William Jerrold
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
– Franz Kafka
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
– Immanuel Kant
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
– Immanuel Kant
Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.
– Alphonse Karr
Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
– Alphonse Karr
No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
– Helen Keller
This is true enough, but success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.
– Michael Korda
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
– Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
– Milan Kundera
I say there is not more happiness for me than the freedom of my Homeland.
– Islom Karimov
May there always be peace, love and happiness in every house.
– Islom Karimov
My biggest wish is to meet with ordinary and common people, to visit their families, that face current difficulties, to talk with fathers and mothers in the families, with veterans who experienced grief and happiness, to meet with youth who are making their first steps in life.
– Islom Karimov
Your destiny is my destiny. Your happiness is my happiness.
– Islom Karimov
I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.
– Max Kauffman
Plant a seed of friendship; reap a bouquet of happiness.
– Lois L. Kaufman
I learned that people everywhere are basically the same and have similar goals that we do. They want health and happiness and the opportunity to provide for their families.
– Steve Kerr
It is an essential part of the interpretive work that it should keep in step with fluctuations between love and hatred, between happiness and satisfaction on the one hand and persecutory anxiety and depression on the other.
– Melanie Klein
Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.
– Rabbi Harold Kushner
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
– The Dalai Lama
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
– Alphonse de Lamartine
The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
– Doug Larson
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
– David Herbert Lawrence
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
– General Robert E. Lee
When I hold you in my arms and I feel my finger on your trigger I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun.
– John Lennon
This consumeristic society we all live in is very complex. We all have very high expectations - we want the big house or the car and the 2.5 kids - but we don't know whether it really brings us happiness and fulfilment because sometimes those dreams burst.
– Annie Lennox
Happiness is a by-product. You cannot pursue it by itself.
– Sam Levenson
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
– C. S. Lewis
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
– C. S. Lewis
Don't wish me happiness-I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor-I will need them all.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The foods that prolong life and increase purity, vigour, health, cheerfulness, and happiness are those that are delicious, soothing, substantial and agreeable... Foods that are bitter, sour, salt, over-hot, pungent, dry and burning produce unhappiness, repentance and disease.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!
– Lawrence G. Lovasik
Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.
– Amy Lowell
Happiness: We rarely feel it. I would buy it, beg it, steal it, Pay in coins of dripping blood For this one transcendent good.
– Amy Lowell
Good heavens, of what uncostly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.
– James Russell Lowell
Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
– John Lubbock
I can but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the duty of happiness as well as the happiness of duty; for we ought to be as bright and genial as we can, if only because to be cheerful ourselves is a most effectual contribution to the happiness of others.
– John Lubbock
Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.
– Clare Boothe Luce