Quotes by American Authors - Page 3233

No beating yourself up. That’s not allowed. Be patient with yourself. It took you years to form the bad habits of thought that you no longer want. It will take a littletime to form new and better ones. But I promise you this: Even a slight move in this direction will bring you some peace. The more effort you apply to it, the faster you’ll find your bliss, but you’ll experience rewards immediately.
Holly Mosier
Many of us seem to live our lives looking for happiness. That is not always a bad thing, but it can be if we continually believe that happiness is someplace else and not in the present.
Barbara Barrington Jones
Respect? Of course, always, to all, because everything seems funnier when you're trying to show respect.
Criss Jami
People expected something for nothing, that’s why they did nothing so beautifully these days.
Holly Hood
I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen
Marisa de los Santos
As I watch him, a sudden recognition comes over me: Tonight, I can be anyone I want… maybe being happy only means living in the moment, appreciating the exact moment you're in and not thinking about the worries of the future.
Laura Fitzgerald
Through strength I found loveIn time I found myself in happiness with you
Alexis Jordan
It was a pity that people did not risk enough to speak out in behalf of one another's happiness and their own.
Louis Zukofsky
I'm generally a happy person -with the help of antidepressants, that is- so there is something to be said for surrounding myself with happy people.
Rachel Machacek
It is too late for me to learn your wisdom in this matter. From the time I knew aught, I have lived with a knight and his lady whose love lit and warmed the dark hall on winter's nights. Madam, my example comes not from any book of romance. My grandparents walked and breathed; they kissed and quarreled. This I must have, and I will seek it with the point of my knife in a bad husband's heart if I can find it no other way.
Roberta Gellis
We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.
Ray Bradbury
Nurturing, Providing, and loving you passionately. May that be, my number of responsibilities. As one to the end, forever more. That's how long I desire, our love to last for. Providing for you many and joyful memories. In hours of darkness, as well as brightness. I plan to supply for you. For your love for me and happiness, is all that matters to me.
Jonathan Anthony Burkett
Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.
Carol Shields
We live in a community of people not so that we can suppress and dominate eachother or make each other miserable but so that we can better and more reliably satisfy all life's healthy needs.
Wilhelm Reich
Happiness is not a state of being. Happiness is a vector, it is movement.
Neal Shusterman
It's hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven't found their special place in life. And sometimes they're dogs from hell and must be destroyed.
Charles Addams
Happiness. It comes onunexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,any early morning talk about it.
Raymond Carver
And Nedley started saying,'Shut Up!Quit that! And i knew it really meant something to him. So I asked for his help,"Mark said. "Don't tell the story like that," Nedley laughed. "What he said was 'Quit pretendin you're a bad guy I need your help, and I need it now!
Margaret Peterson Haddix
The secret of happiness is something to do
John Burroughs
It is not where we are that matters nor what we have, it is what we do with where we are and what we have.
Sonia Rumzi
I was terrified of my weakness, of my sharp tongue, ofmy every flaw. I was terrified that this moment, my chance tolive in happiness for however short a time we may have had,would be ruined because I was simply not carved out of thesame wood as happiness, and that my grain was too twistedto ever take its form.
Amy Lane
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
Sylvia Plath
If you stay in the company of anger, pain, or hurt, happiness will find someone else to visit. Make the choice to view all of your past relationships as a gift. Throw out what hasn’t worked in the past and incorporate new concepts. Focus on being happy.
Kristen Crockett
Again, I am surprised why people seek to eliminate lust and cling to love; as they wish to ignore happiness and cleave unto joy! Now, now, let's not sugar-coat things! Lust has a lot more to do with life and what is the good of life if you do not carry much lust inside of you at all times? And joy is a noble thing, but happiness though fleeting can be found every day and in every small little way!
C. JoyBell C.
Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom.
Lauren Oliver
She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.
Maud Hart Lovelace
What would it be like to look in the mirror and actually accept what you see? Not loathe the reflection, or despise it, or be resigned to it? But to like it?
Justina Chen
How to win in life:1 work hard 2 complain less 3 listen more 4 try, learn, grow5 don't let people tell you it cant be done6 make no excuses
Germany Kent
Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.
Helen Keller
His gut was stitched up good and tight, but that didn’t prevent it from flopping. He wiped his damp palms on the legs of his jeans and stood up shakily, leaning heavily on his cane.He called himself a masochist for putting himself through this torture day after day.He braced himself for the disappointment of having to go home alone.He braced himself for happiness like he’d never known in his entire life.He watched the door they would come through.
Sandra Brown
A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing or to love the right person or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.
Thomas Lewis
Your most important “want” should be the one you can control!
Shannon L. Alder
We left behind the other kids; their path-working, drinking, and being grown up- and rejected all that made them grumpy, uncreative and lifeless. We dumpstered, squatted, and shoplifted our lives back. Everything fell into place when we decided our lives were meant to be lived. Life serves the risk taker...
CrimethInc.
that's exactly the good thing about the Injun life--you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'--which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks
Jim Fergus
If life throws you a few bad notes or vibrations, don't let them interrupt or alter your song.
Suzy Kassem
I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room
Audrey Niffenegger
Gratitude always comes into play; research shows that people are happier if they are grateful for the positive things in their lives, rather than worrying about what might be missing.
Dan Buettner
The good news is that I believe every woman who wants to can find a great partner. You're just going to need to get rid of the idea that marriage will make you happy. It won't. Once the initial high wears off, you'll just be you, except with twice as much laundry. Because ultimately, marriage is not about getting something -- it's about giving it. Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession -- a free-agent penis -- and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland.
Tracy McMillan
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Theodore Roosevelt
Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.
Fulton J. Sheen
If you love a person, you should show it in adundance, not reserve it for special occasions like fine china.
Bryan Cohen
It is in the balancing of your spirituality with your humanity that you will find immeasurable happiness, success, good health, and love.
Steve Maraboli
Happiness isn’t the reward we retrieve after a long struggle. It arrives daily, in those clear moments when our hearts are tender, pricked by the embrace of a loved one, the beauty of a single flower, the majesty of the world in which we are central. Look over your shoulder at how far you’ve come and all the good things you’ve experienced and that is when you will see the smiling face of happiness.
Toni Sorenson
So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this?""Oh, there's definitely happiness," Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. "But it's just about moments, not ever-afters." He grinned. "Like when you're right in the middle of the ocean with your friends, with no one trying to kill you in any kind of horrifying way. You have to appreciate these moments when they happen, 'cause obviously we don't get many of them.
James Riley
I wonder if people always choose what will make them unhappy.
Megan Whalen Turner
Frugality, I've learned, has its own cost, one that sometimes lasts forever.
Nicholas Sparks
This idea of perpetual happiness is crazy and overrated, because those dark moments fuel you for the next bright moments; each one helps you appreciate the other.
Brad Pitt
The only way I can be angry at you is when I have thought, said, or done something that is unkind in my own opinion.
Byron Katie
You will realize one day that all the money in the world cannot buy you happiness. Nor can it make you a person of good character. 
Richelle E. Goodrich
Dream your dream; and realize that you are more than just the dreamer, you are the point of origin for its reality.
Steve Maraboli
They think I’m simpleminded because I seem to be happy. Why shouldn’t I be happy? I have everything I ever wanted and more. Maybe I am simpleminded. Maybe that’s the key: simple.
Dolly Parton
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
Mark Nepo
Stop waiting for the perfect day or the perfect moment... Take THIS day, THIS moment and lead it to perfection.
Steve Maraboli
Don't wait for other people to be loving, giving, compassionate, grateful, forgiving, generous, or friendly... lead the way!
Steve Maraboli
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Michael Cunningham
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
Daniel Kahneman
If you’re not happy, then something is wrong. A person comes into the world as a happy being, yet over time, the happiness fades away and they find themselves in this bubble of anxiety and misery all the time. And it’s a comfortable place to stay, so they end up hanging out in this bubble for years and years before it suddenly dawns on them that life is meant to be happy. And, it is. It’s just that they’re too busy getting caught up in worry and stress to notice that life is magnificent and beautiful. Being alive is good. Being alive should already make you happy.
Leigh Hershkovich
When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).
Ariel Gore
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Lionel Shriver
I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go.
Criss Jami