Quotes About Happiness

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One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) – The Education of Henry Adams, Ch. 20, 1907

The greatest sweetener of human life is friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) – Quoted in Hugs for Girlfriends by Philis Boultinghouse and LeAnn Weiss p7, but there appears to be no published sources for this statement prior to 2001.

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) – The Spectator (1711-12), No. 15, March 17, 1711.

Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn;
Joseph Addison (1672-1719) – “The Campaign,” 1704, line 102.

Happiness is a perfume that one cannot shed over another without a few drops falling on oneself.
Anon – but often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson but cannot be found in any of his works. See a discussion here: http://www.firstnerve.com/2008/10/happiness-is-perfume.html.

Wealth and poverty do not lie in a man’s estate, but in men’s souls.
Antisthenes (445 BC – 365 BC)- Xenophon, Symposium, iv. 34

Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) – Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. B.C.), I.8,Tr. Thompson

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) – in Politics

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) – Meditations Book XI, XV

Very little is needed to make a happy life.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) – Meditations Book VII, 67

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, therefore guard accordingly; and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) – Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts, ed. T. Edwards, Cassell Publishing Co., 1891, p. 572

Action is the antidote to despair.
Joan Baez (1941 -) – Rolling Stone, 1983

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how deeply we pay for its counterfeit.
Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) – Quoted in Hoyt’s Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1922, p350, sourced as MS, Sermons.

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
John Barrymore (1882-1942) – Quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, 2006

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) – Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
William Blake (1757-1827) – “Eternity” (1793-99)

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) – Aphorisms, no. 33 (1930)

Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) – The Child Who Never Grew, 1950, Woodbine House Ed, 1992, p.25

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.
George Washington Burnap (1802-1859}- The Sphere and Duties of Woman : A Course of Lectures (1848), Lecture IV – Quote misattributed to Joseph Addison

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) -Camus, A. (2020). Personal Writings. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) – Camus, A. (2012). The Fall. United Kingdom: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, p 80.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.
Willa Cather (1873-1947)  Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 13 (10 September 1902)

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Willa Cather (1873-1947)– My Antonia, 1918, Book 1, Ch 2.

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that we obtain from our surroundings.
Clement of Alexandria  aka Titus Flavius Clemens (150-215 A.D.)  Strom. II., 21 – Quoted in The Wisdom of Life, by Arthur Schopenhauer, “Division of the Subject,” London, 1890, p.4.

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 (1777-1832)  Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think. United Kingdom: Peter Burtsell, 1821, p. 74.

What is earthly happiness? that phantom of which we hear so much, and see so little; whose promises are constantly given and constantly broken, but as constantly believed; that cheats us with the sound instead of the substance, and with the blossom instead of the fruit. Like Juno, she is a goddess in pursuit, but a cloud in possession.
Charles Caleb Colton (1777-1832), Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think. United Kingdom: Peter Burtsell, 1821, p. 74.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather (1873-1947)  My Ántonia. United States: Houghton Mifflin Company., Book 1, part 2.

Happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.
William Cowper (1731-1800) –  From the poem: Table Talk, Line 246.

Happiness—a butterfly, which when pursued seems always just beyond your grasp; but if you sit down quietly, may light upon you.
Daily Crescent – Wrongly attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Earliest evidence of the saying comes from various periodicals beginning in 1848.  First newspaper to carry this form of the quote was the Daily Crescent in New Orleans, Louisiana.  See the Quote Investigator for more details.

Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887) – A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858, p. 256

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.
Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) – Rebecca, 1938

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.
English Proverb

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them oneself, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)  Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, “Man the Reformer, 1844,  p126.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) – Essay “Nature”

Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account.
Euripides (480-406BC) – Bellerophon, Fragment 298; quoted in Plutarch’s Morals : Ethical Essays (1888) edited and translated by Arthur Richard Shilleto, p. 293

Human nature, at its best, had always been based on a deep heroic restlessness, on wanting something–something else, something more, whether it be true love or a glimpse just beyond the horizon. It was the promise of happiness, not the attainment of it, that had driven the entire engine, the folly and glory of who we are.
Will Ferguson Happiness, Penguin Books, 2002

A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) – Essay on “Happiness”

It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) – Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) – Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

Happiness consists more in small conveniences of pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.
Benjamin Franklin (1714-1790) – Letter to Lord Kames, 1786, in Papers, Vol 15, pp. 60-61.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Robert Frost – Poem Title – first Published in the Atlantic Monthly, Sept 1938 and is a lyric written in iambic trimeter. Quoted in the Robert Frost Encyclopedia, Nancy Lewis Tuten, John Zubizarreta, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, p. 143.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) – Quoted in Wisdom for the Soul, ed Larry Chang, p353.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often times filled with your tears.
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) “On Joy and Sorrow,” The Prophet (1923)

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) “On Joy and Sorrow,” The Prophet (1923)

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944) – The Mad Woman of Challot, adapted by Maurice Valency,  p. 64  (1974)

The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) – Wilhelm Meister

The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) – Wilhelm Meister

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 (1749-1832) – Quoted in Perfect Jewels, a collection of the choicest things in the literature of Life, Love and Religion, Mills, Dodge & Pomeroy, 1886, p. 545.

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 (1868-1936) – The Zykovs, in Gorky Plays 2, Translated by Cathy Porter, 2003,  Original  1914

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.
Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940) Quoted in the Lutheran Quarterly Vol XLIV, 1914, p 514.

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; but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, “Here it is!” like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find.
Nathaniel Hawthorn (1804-1864 – The American Notebooks 1835 – 1853, 1851.

Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
Herman Hesse (1877-1962) – Quoted in: Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, 2006

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) – The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

To believe that if we could have but this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness.
Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) – The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that one is loved; loved for oneself, or better yet, loved despite oneself.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) – Les Miserables, 1862.

Happiness is a hard master particularly other people’s happiness.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) – Brave New World, ch. 16, (1932) Spoken by the character Mustapha Mond.

‘Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.’
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) – Brave New World, 1970

Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmit ting to others the rays of a supreme and ever shining benevolence.
Washington Irving (1783-1859) – The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, “Christmas,” Vol II, London, 1822, p. 13.

… happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) The Gods and Other Lectures, “The Gods,” C. P. Farrell,  1879,  p86

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James (1843-1916) – Roderick Hudson (1907), ch. I: Rowland, p7.

You have seen enough of the different conditions of life to know that it neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) – Letter to Mrs. Anna Jefferson Marks, Paris, July 12, 1788, in The Quotable Jefferson, Princeton University press, 2006, p235.

Your own happiness will be the greater as you perceive that you promote that of others.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) – Letter to Mrs. Anna Jefferson Marks, Paris, July 12, 1788, in The Quotable Jefferson, Princeton University press, 2006, p235.

Happiness . . . does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) – The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol III, 1781-1784, Putnam’s Sons, 1894, p.253

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers gardens.
Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857) – Specimens of Douglas Jerrold’s Wit, ed Blanchard Jerrold, 3rd ed, Ticknor and Fields, 1859, p. 168.

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth, and choice.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) – Cynthia’s Revels, Act III Sc.2, Gutenberg.org. 

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics (1785), (GMS IV: 418)

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad,. Northern women development. [Nigeria]. p, 351.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller (1880-1968), We Bereaved (1929)

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) – The Simplest Way to be Happy, Home magazine, Feb, 1933.

Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) – Optimism (1903)

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) – My Key of Life, Optimism , an Essay, London: Isbister &  Co. (1903), p1.

Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) Quoted in Reflections of Helen, Gary Haun, Author House, 2009.   p. 15.

If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) -My Key of Life, Optimism , an Essay, London: Isbister &  Co. (1903)

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Soren KierkegaardParables of Kierkegaaard  Ed. Thomas Owen, Princeton University Press, (1978), p27.

Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things and it is from having what we desire that we are happy – not from having what others think agreeable.
Duc De La RochefoucaulMaxims (1665)

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) – Quoted in Worth Repeating: More than 5000 Classic and Contemporary Quotes, ed Bob Kelly, Kregel Publications, 2003, p. 193

If a man has not got the elements of happiness in himself, not all the beauty and variety, the pleasures and interests of the world can give it to him.
What we do see depends mainly on what we look for.
Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) The Use of Life, Chapter XVIII, “On Peace and Happiness,” New York, MacMillan, 1923, p 270.

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) The Use of Life, Chapter XVIII, “On Peace and Happiness,” New York, MacMillan, 1923, p 271.

To do something however small, to make others happier and better, is the highest ambition, the most elevating hope, which can inspire a human being.
Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) The Use of Life, Chapter XIII, “Industry,” New York, MacMillan, 1923, p 203.

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living with what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman MacEwan (1881-1953) – Quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations, ed Leslie Ann Gibson, Steve Deger,  Globe Pedquot, 2024, p. 28.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) – No Man is an Island, 1955.

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) – No Man Is An Island, 1955, 1983

I do not like the idea of happiness it is too momentary I would say that I was always busy and interested in something interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.
Georgia O’Keefe – The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O Keeffe & Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire (Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster Inc., New York, 1990), p. 324

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim (1882-1932) – Also attributed to James Openheimer, one of the scientists who helped make the atomic bomb. The quote however, does not seem his style.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell (1903-1950) – Critical Essays, 1945.

Happiness is a by-product of an effort to make someone else happy.
Gretta Brooker Palmer (1905-1953) – Quoted in Memorable Quotations: American Women Writers of the Past, ed. Dell, Writers Club Press, 2000, p. 217

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911) – Dr. Zay, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963 ) – The Bell Jar, Ch. 8, 1963

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.
Anna Quindlen (1952 – ) – A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Random House, 2001, p45.

The happiness of life consists, like the day, not in single flashes (of light), but in one continuous mild serenity. The most beautiful period of the heart s existence is in this calm equable light, even although it be only moonshine or twilight. Now the mind alone can obtain for us this heavenly cheerfulness and peace.
Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) – Quoted in Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, S. Austin Allibone, comp., 1880, p302.

Happiness lies more in imagination than in real possession. We are made happy by obtaining, not what others esteem desirable, but what we ourselves think so.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) – Maxims, and Moral Reflections. By the Duke de la Rochefoucault, Volume 8, Edinburgh, 1796, Maxim CLXXXVII, p.53.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin D. Roosevelt  (1882-1945) – (First Inaugural Address Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Third American Revolution, Mario R. DiNunzio, ABC-CLIO, 2011, p113.

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
Joseph Roux (1834-1905) – Meditations of a Parish Priest, Pens es, translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1886, Part 9, LIV

Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.
Theodore Isaac Rubin (1923- ) – Quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, 2006

Indeed, man wished to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
St. Augustine (Augustine of Hippo) – (354-430)   The City of God, 426, 

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan (1908-1981) – My Heart’s in the Highlands,  (1939)

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure, are by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Quoted in How we choose to be Happy, Rick Foster, Greg Hicks, Penguin Publishing Group, 2004, p14, 

The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) –The Wisdom of Life and other  Essays, 1841, p4.

It is quite certain that what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has…What a man has in himself is, then, the chief element in his happiness.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – The Wisdom of Life, “Division of the Subject,” London, 1890

The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – The Wisdom of Life, “Division of the Subject,” London, 1890

There is no happiness on earth like that which at the propitious moment a fine and fruitful mind finds in itself.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – Essays, “Thinking for Oneself,” 1841

Money is human happiness in abstraction; so that a man who is no longer capable of enjoying it in concrete gives up his whole heart to it.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – Essays, “Psychological Observations,” 1841

The state of human happiness, for the most part, is like certain groups of trees, which seen from a distance look wonderfully fine; but if we go up to them and among them, their beauty disappears; we do not know wherein it lay, for it is only trees that surround us. And so it happens that we often envy the position of others.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) – Essays, “Psychological Observations,” 1841

To live happily is the same thing as to live in accordance with nature’s laws.
Idem est ergo beate vivere et secundum naturam.
Seneca The Younger (4 BC – AD 65) – De Vita Beata, VIII. , 2.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without creating it.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) – Candida, Act I (1898)

Happiness is not in our circumstances, but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.
John B. Sheerin (1907-1992) – Quoted in the Odessa American, Newspaper, September 4, 1956, p 5.

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attributes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)- Pavel Rusanov in, Cancer Ward p266.

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) – Shulubin, in Cancer Ward (1968) Pt. 2, Ch. 10

Pollo to phronein eudaimonias proton uparchei
Wisdom is the greatest part of happiness.
Sophocles (496 BC – 406BC) – Antigone, 1347-8

Conscious virtue is the only solid foundation of all happiness; for riches, power, rank, or whatever, in the common acceptation of the word, is supposed to constitute happiness, will never quiet, much less cure, the inward pangs of guilt.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694-1773) -letter, Dec. 26, 1749, Letters Written by the Late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl, Esq, 5th ed., vol. II, p. 307, London (1774).

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.
Stendhal – Pen Name of French writer Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842) – Journal entry. 10 December 1801.

There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)  – An Apology for Idlers, and other essays,  Good Press, 2023.

One of the surest ways to find happiness for yourself is to devote your energies toward making someone else happy. Happiness is an elusive, transitory thing. And if you set out in search for it, you will find it evasive. But if you try and bring happiness to someone else, then it comes to you.
W. Clement Stone (1902-2002) – W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill, Success through a Positive Mental Attitude, 1960

 Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) – Walden, conclusion, paragraph 13.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) – War and Peace Book IV, ch. 1.

There is no such thing as finding true happiness by searching for it directly. It must come, if come at all, indirectly, or by the service, the love and the happiness we give to others.
Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) – What all the World’s A-Seeking, 1896.

Happiness is a good that nature sells us.
Voltaire (1694-1778) – “Discourses on Man, Number 4,” in Life of Voltaire, Volume 2, James Parton, 1889, 332

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
Denis Waitley – 1933 -) – Quoted in Happiness: A Choice, Barbara A. McLeroy, Balboa Press, 1920.

Happiness is the manifest rule of life.
H.G.Wells (1866-1946) –Apropos of Dolores, Scribner’s Sons, 1938, p16.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards, they try to have more things or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
Margaret Young (1891-1969) Quoted in Change Your Life, Alan Klein, Viva Editions, 2010

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