Quotes by Journalists - Page 238

Happiness, said De Quincey, on his discovery of the paradise that he thought he had found in opium, could be sent down by the mail-coach; more truly I could announce my discovery that delight could be contained in small octavos and small type, in a bookshelf three feet long.
Arthur Machen
In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place.
Lev Grossman
Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.
José Martí
Don’t think about happiness. If it doesn’t come, there’s no disappointment; if it does come, it’s a surprise.
Bolesław Prus
The person with the least worry over the compromises he must make is, of course, the person who doesn't compromise.
Mark Sundeen
It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.
Laura Lippman
Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.
Richard Rodríguez
Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?
Amin Maalouf
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
Albert Camus
Kurzes Glück kann jeder.
Kurt Tucholsky
Analyzing data from 79 men and women who wore inconspicuous devices that recorded some of their conversations over the course of four days, researchers from Washington University and the University of Arizona found a correlation between feelings of well-being and the amount of time spent talking every day. Moreover, the more substantive your conversations, the happier you're likely to be. In other words, heart-to-hearts trump small talk. (LA Times, "A lof of happy talk", March 11, 2010, A21.)
Meghan Daum
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
..there is more to life than just pleasure. We want to achieve our happiness and not just experience it.
Eric Weiner
Ivan tells Anna: "I used to imagine that being embraced by a woman . . . as something so wonderful that it would make me forget everthing . . . [But] happiness, it turns out, will be to share with you the burden I can't share with anyone else.
Vasily Grossman
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
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
The good life doesn't knock on the door. Joy is a job.
Lionel Shriver
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
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
I know money isn't everything. but it certainly is something.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
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
.. she believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by.
Gyula Krúdy
(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me."And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy."...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven.
Brenda Ueland
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
Gabriel García Márquez
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
Peter Heller
When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.
Dorothy Day
I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.
Eric Weiner
What is your idea of earthly happiness? To be vindicated in my own lifetime.
Christopher Hitchens
There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
Albert Camus
You start dying slowly if you do not travel, if you do not read, If you do not listen to the sounds of life, If you do not appreciate yourself.You start dying slowly When you kill your self-esteem; When you do not let others help you.You start dying slowly If you become a slave of your habits, Walking everyday on the same paths…If you do not change your routine, If you do not wear different colours Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.You start dying slowly If you avoid to feel passion And their turbulent emotions; Those which make your eyes glisten And your heart beat fast.You start dying slowly If you do not change your life when you are not satisfied with your job, or with your love, If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain, If you do not go after a dream, If you do not allow yourself, At least once in your lifetime, To run away from sensible advice.
Martha Medeiros
Sometimes I wish life was written pencil so we could erase it and write it all over again.
Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.
Allison Winn Scotch
There's a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.It is really that simple.And that hard.
John Connolly
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
Albert Camus
Much of what we called "depression" was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren't willing to work for.
Mitch Albom
She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.''Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
Hunter S. Thompson
I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.
David Brooks
when he smiles it's as if you'd just told him the first joke on earth.
Mitch Albom
De pronto tuve conciencia de que ese momento, de que esa rebanada de cotidianidad, era el grado máximo de bienestar, era la Dicha. Nunca había sido tan plenamente feliz como en ese momento, pero tenía la hiriente sensación de que nunca más volvería a serlo, por lo menos en ese grado, con esa intensidad
Mario Benedetti
Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch.
Walt Whitman
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.
Katherine Dunn
Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
Albert Camus
I've learned .... That when you harbor bitterness, happiness will dock elsewhere.
Andy Rooney
[Happiness is] a ghost, it’s a shadow. You can’t really chase it. It’s a by-product, a very pleasant side effect to a life lived well.
Eric Weiner
The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Michael Pollan
People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Ernest Hemingway
I remember watching it all and getting the tickling in my chest and thinking to myself: This is what happiness feels like.
Gayle Forman
When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.
Vincent Starrett
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
Albert Camus
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering
Albert Camus
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
Albert Camus
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Albert Camus
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H.L. Mencken
Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
Andy Rooney
So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?
Hunter S. Thompson
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
Gabriel García Márquez
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus
لا شئ أخطر من رجل لا يخضع للطاغية
Sándor Márai