Quotes by American Authors - Page 3232

The greatest gift you can ever give another person is your own happiness
Esther Hicks
Your purpose is your why.
Deborah Day
In the West, for example, people believe they must 'pursue happiness' as if it were some kind of a flighty bird that is always out of reach. In the East, we believe we are born with happiness and one of life's important takes, my mother told me, is to protect it.
Le Ly Hayslip
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer
We just wanna be the happy bums that we are. That's all.
Mike Patton
Sometimes you have to get sad before you get happy 'cause otherwise how would you know the difference?
Maureen Child
Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day.
Francis Gray
The more you take responsibility for your attitudes, the more you can adjust yourself in a forward thinking manner.
Deborah Day
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.
Roger Zelazny
Nonetheless, when it finally ended and the hairdressers left and Tess insisted upon pulling her to the mirror, Fire saw, and understood, that everyone had done the job well. The dress, deep shimmering purple and utterly simple in design, was so beautifully-cut and so clingy and well-fitting that Fire felt slightly naked. And her hair. She couldn’t follow what they’d done with her hair, braids thin as threads in some places, looped and wound through the thick sections that fell over her shoulders and down her back, but she saw that the end result was a controlled wildness that was magnificent against her face, her body, and the dress. She turned to measure the effect on her guard - all twenty of them, for all had roles to play in tonight’s proceedings, and all were awaiting her orders. Twenty jaws hung slack with astonishment - even Musa’s, Mila’s, and Neel’s. Fire touched their minds, and was pleased, and then angry, to find them open as the glass roofs in July.‘Take hold of yourselves,’ she snapped. ‘It’s a disguise, remember? This isn’t going to work if the people meant to help me can’t keep their heads.’‘It will work, Lady Granddaughter.’ Tess handed Fire two knives in ankle holsters. ‘You’ll get what you want from whomever you want. Tonight King Nash would give you the Winged River as a present, if you asked for it. Dells, child - Prince Brigan would give you his best warhorse.
Kristin Cashore
You know what Marshall needs to do. He needs to stop being sad. When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead. True story.
Barney Stinson
Thoughts are just thoughts, and they can’t hurt you. My thoughts land in my mind like a butterfly; they stay for a while, then flutter away. The butterfly isn’t me. I can step away from it, and watch it, learn from it, enjoy it, without needing to absorb it into my identity.
Julie Farrell
Jealous of the crazy gay kid. That doesn't sound right.""Hey, Sol," she said, her tone getting serious for a second. "Those are two things about you out of a million. Don't box yourself in.
John Corey Whaley
No matter how much someone else loves you or you love other people, if you don’t love yourself then it can never be enough.
Shannon Kaiser
Je tiefer sich das Leid in euer Sein eingräbt, desto mehr Freude könnt ihr fassen.
Kahlil Gibran
Some people are like a thermometer. If their environment is negative, they are negative. If bad things happen, they are sad. If good things happen, they are happy. They are simply a product of their environment. Successful people, on the other hand, are more like a thermostat. Even if their environment is negative, they choose to be positive.
Cameron C. Taylor
But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very positively she wanted it.
Nella Larsen
At any given moment, your circumstances can change. You may not be where you want to be right now. You may not even be doing what you prefer to do. But, if you change your way of thinking and realize that you have all the opportunities available to you just like each one of us. You can begin to focus on what you want to achieve and make it happen
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
so many thoughts, my kvothe. you know too much to be happy.
Patrick Rothfuss
My scars tell a story. They are a reminder of times when life tried to break me, but failed. They are markings of where the structure of my character was welded.
Steve Maraboli
If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it.
Richard Bach
Dads. It’s time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we’d like. It’s time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks. It’s time to take joy in their facial expressions and their mispronounced words. It’s time to take joy in everything that our kids are.
Dan Pearce
Dads. Do you not realize that a child is what you tell them they are? That people almost always become what they are labeled? Was whatever your child just did really the “dumbest thing you’ve ever seen somebody do”? Was it really the “most ridiculous thing they ever could have done”? Do you really believe that your child is an idiot? Because she now does. Think about that. Because you said it, she now believes it. Bravo.
Dan Pearce
They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
Lauren Oliver
I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.
Robert Rauschenberg
Happiness is the feeling we experience when we are too busy to be miserable.
Thomas L. Masson
She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.
David Wroblewski
How to Find Your Joylah1. Try new things2. Be open to new friends3. Visit new places4. Listen to new ideas5. Remember each day is a new day6. And it's really no big deal if beads get mixed up every once in a while
Elizabeth Atkinson
Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.
Lionel Shriver
Mankind were intended to be happy... that government being only the means of securing freedom and happiness to the people, whenever it deviates from this end, and their freedom and happiness are in great danger of being irrevocably lost, the government is no longer entitled to their allegiance. ("The Principles of an American Whig"-1777)
Jamie Iredell
Cynicism is the calling card of unhappy people.
Iimani David
..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It's lovely to see people so happy.
Louisa May Alcott
Sometimes customizing is necessary because of an injury or the inability to do, for a short or long period, the kind of exercise you formerly did. When you're used to customizing for fun, doing it under duress won't seem like such an imposition. Either way, experiment until you find activities that make you happy as well as healthy. Choose your exercise using the same criteria you'd apply to choosing a date--that is, attractive to you and able to hold your interest for an hour.
Victoria Moran
Fate is the malevolent little jester sitting up in the heavens and pondering over how ridiculous we humans are and he does his best to make fools out of all of us. And sooner or later he succeeds.
Lisa Kleypas
Give more, so that we can build more, put interest in understanding another more in whatever actions one might carry out in life. Because we all are fighting for survival against adversaries and are sometimes falling, but if we stand together and help shield and strengthen one another, imagine the world that we will live in together, having more happiness with one another, at one another’s side.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.
Michael Pollan
Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world.
William Lyon Phelps
People with the most interests live, not only longest, but happiest.
George Matthew Allen
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana
Happiness never made anyone rich or famous. That must be why ambitious people avoid it.
Marty Rubin
And though I was currently living a fairy tale, some part of my soul knew that happiness couldn't last forever. I didn't deserve a happily ever after, and there weren't many other cards to play when that was the truth.
Alysha Speer
The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. Your have to catch up with it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin
Get out of your own way… stop the paralysis by analysis… decide what you want, create a simple plan, and get moving!
Steve Maraboli
I had decided to stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion.
Tony Hsieh
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
Envy nobody. It is the true secret of happiness, or at least the only one I know. (By Moonlight)
Peter S Beagle
Happiness is the highest form of self-respect. A person who allows himself to be happy shows his self-respect.
Maery Rubin
If you can channel the best part of you that is bigger than yourself, where it’s not about your ego and not about getting ahead, then you can have fun and you aren’t jealous of others. You see other people's talent as another branch of your own. You can keep it rooted in joy. Life is long and there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes. The point of it all is to learn.
Ethan Hawke
The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
I like how Mother Teresa put it: "Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile." If you approach life this way, always looking for ways to build instead of to tear down, you'll be amazed at how much happiness you can give to others and find for yourself
Sean Covey
A FriendSomeoneYou're happy to see,Who's happy to see you.SomeoneYou like for who they areNot just for what they can do for you.
Nancy J. Cavanaugh
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.
Steve Maraboli
I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.
H.P. Lovecraft
Happiness does not come from a job. It comes from knowing what you truly value, and behaving in a way that’s consistent with those beliefs.
Mike Rowe
Separate yourself from those who hinder your vision. Make a choice to walk away from the trap set to ensnare you. Realize when someone is pulling you backwards every time you take a step forward. Separate from them and the result of your action will be a life of success.
Amaka Imani Nkosazana
Don't nourish your fears more than you nourish your hopes.
Steve Maraboli
To embark on the journey towards your goals and dreams requires bravery. To remain on that path requires courage. The bridge that merges the two is commitment.
Steve Maraboli
Keep in mind that the reason you know you can be good to others is only because you've taken strides to be better for and to yourself.
Alexandra Elle
Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be… doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.
Dan Pearce