Happiness Quotes

The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.

~ Josef Pieper

We remember though all the firelit glowOf a great hearth's gleam and glare,And we looked for a space at each happy faceAnd the love that was written there.

~ Caris Brooke

I feel as though I should say something profound, or enact some rite, or trade something to make it official. I want to transfer some trinket which would allow me to say that she's my girl, some kind of currency that proves to people that she likes me back. Something that would permit me to think about her all the time without feeling guilty or helpless or hopelessly far away. I guess I'm just so excited, I want to cage this thing like a tiny red bird so if can't fly away, so it stays the same, so it's still there the next time. For keeps, like a coin in your pocket. Like a peach pit from Mad Jack Lionel's tree. Like scribbled words in a locked suitcase. A bright balloon to tie to your bedpost. And you want to hug it close, hold it, but not so tight it bursts.

~ Craig Silvey

I could hear the knock and whistle of the water pipes, the purr of the calico cat. And at that moment a happiness filled me that was pure and perfect and yet it was bled with despair - as if I had been handed a cup of ambrosial nectar to drink from and knew that once I finished drinking, the cup would be withdrawn forever, and nothing to come would ever taste as good.

~ David Leavitt

The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature

~ John Piper

If you think happiness is a rare bird you won't see much of it.

~ Marty Rubin

Happiness is a decision and so as Love. If you decide to be happy then you're happy. If you decide to love then you love.

~ Ann Marie Aguilar

Não é verdade que a felicidade é aquilo que procuramos sem nunca sermos capazes de a reconhecer?

~ Marc Levy

Happiness is something that you cannot see. It is naturally felt. When you feel it, you wouldn't wanna let go of it. It makes you smile. It keeps you going. It gives you the energy that nothing and nobody can give. Ig pushes to do things that renders positive vibe inside. Happiness is felt in the most unexpected time and place. It's a natural phenomenon.

~ Nio Noveno

Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.

~ C.s. Lewis

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Original, in French: La bonne cuisine est la base du véritable bonheur. English: Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.

~ Auguste Escoffier

When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.

~ Jeffrey Bernard

Man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.

~ Albert Einstein

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?

~ Roman Payne

Only a fool can be happy. For happiness consists of two contradictory elements: contentment and pleasure. Enjoy pleasure and you have no contentment; be content and you have no pleasure. For this reason happiness is conceivable only for those who enjoy themselves without thinking that they will always want more and thus be discontented, or for those who are content without thinking that they have no pleasure. Whoever reflects can never be happy, unless he is a fanatic and thus blinded…thus exercising control over his intelligence with his feelings, instead of the other way round

~ Marcellus Emants

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities..

~ Christian Nestell Bovee

No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.

~ Josef Pieper

La felicidad es una bendición, pero generalmente es también una conquista.

~ Paulo Coelho

Our greatest happiness comes from the experience of love & compassion.

~ Allan Lokos

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

~ Virginia Woolf

Times of terror and the deepest misery may arrive, but if there is to be any happiness in this misery it can only be a spiritual happiness, related to the past in the rescue of the culture of early ages and to the future in a serene and indefatigable championship of the spirit in a time which would otherwise completely swallow up the material.

~ Hermann Hesse

There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it's not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.

~ Gretchen Rubin

We each sell alittle piece of happiness. You are elevating someone's spirit in some way, and to do that you have to understand the source of their angst and then you have to frame your product as a solution.

~ Sonia Marciano

People argue themselves out of their pleasures

~ Jude Morgan

The golden rule of business is supply and demand. I venture to say that this is also the rule of happiness. When a balance is achieved between our desires and another's willingness to satisfy them, the result is a sympathetic, mutually rewarding relationship. (...) a thriving economy of love.' - character Mike Lambeth

~ Caroline Adderson

…feeling as if all the happiness and support of their lives was about to be taken from them.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Можно лежать на мосту и смотреть, как течет вода. Или бегать, или побродить по болоту в красных сапожках, или же свернуться клубочком и слушать, как дождь стучит по крыше. Быть счастливой очень легко.

~ Tove Jansson

May I nurture the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can change and wisdom to know the difference

~ Frank Ra (Exstatica)

Don't look to a husband or a child or a friend or your family to make you happy. It is not within their capacity to do so.

~ Barbara Barrington Jones

Being happy is a great science. If you are not happy, do not be confused. Happiness is hard to achieve.

~ Petar Dunov

Manners and politeness will never become old-fashioned.

~ Auliq Ice

My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.

~ Michael Palin

It might be true that it is “quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.

~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Happiness is the change that comes over mewhen I describe the worldIt comes over the worldHappiness is the change that comes over mewhen I'm afraidIt comes over the worldFor instance I can be afraid of and for the worldafraid because the world consists among other thingsof me so swiftly dying

~ Inger Christensen

When I count my blessings, I find you in every one.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It's always something here - if there isn't a riot, then someone's usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don't have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame - someone wearing shiny boots. That's why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a real stinker.

~ Steve Toltz

A sense of peace came over me and I must have been smiling as I fell asleep.

~ Harry Bernstein

...the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.

~ George Gissing