Quotes by American Authors - Page 3240

Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.
Bobbe Sommer
dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.
Nina LaCour
If you wish to be happy,Eragon, Think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and that which you are able to change
Christopher Paolini
I shall take the heart. For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.
L. Frank Baum
Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.
Jacqueline Kelly
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have.
Doris Mortman
Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
Marie Rutkoski
We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? (136-137)
Swami Satchidananda
right in this moment, I can´t even remember what unhappy feels like.
Maggie Stiefvater
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
Dennis Lehane
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
When you are joyful, when you say yes to life and have fun and project positivity all around you, you become a sun in the center of every constellation, and people want to be near you.
Shannon L. Alder
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
Carroll Bryant
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.
Elizabeth Berg
Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.
Dale Carnegie
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
Dorothy Parker
I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.
J.D. Salinger
Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
Andy Rooney
Happiness doesn't result from what we get, but from what we give.
Ben Carson
There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
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
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Is anyone anywhere happy?
Sylvia Plath
Memory is the happiness of being alone.
Lois Lowry
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
Orson Scott Card
It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
Lucille Ball
Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...
Susan Polis Schutz
People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.
Elizabeth Gilbert
There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
Jodi Picoult
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
Elizabeth Gilbert
Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.
Jack Kerouac
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.
Dave Ramsey
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There you go...let it all slide out. Unhappiness can't stick in a person's soul when it's slick with tears.
Shannon Hale
those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.
Alex Flinn
Success is getting what you want..Happiness is wanting what you get.
Dale Carnegie
It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.
Lemony Snicket
The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.
Gretchen Rubin
Be believing, be happy, don't get discouraged. Things will work out.
Gordon B. Hinckley
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.
Laini Taylor
Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.
Sarah Addison Allen
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
William James
If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton
I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
J.D. Salinger
I am very happyBecause I have conquered myselfAnd not the world.I am very happyBecause I have loved the worldAnd not myself.
Sri Chinmoy
What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.
Anaïs Nin
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
J.D. Salinger
That's the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn't good enough for me! I demand euphoria!
Bill Watterson
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
Martha Washington
Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.
Marianne Williamson
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx
We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
Charles Bukowski
You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.
Mandy Hale
I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe
Laughter is poison to fear.
George R.R. Martin
I think happiness is what makes you pretty. Period. Happy people are beautiful. They become like a mirror and they reflect that happiness.
Drew Barrymore
I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.
Carrie Jones