Happiness Quotes - Page 168

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.

Ramana Maharshi

Before you can successfully make friends with others, first you have to become your own friend.

Stephen Richards

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

Albert Camus

Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

Jane Austen

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Socrates

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

Honoré de Balzac

Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.

Amit Ray

...is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.

Orson Scott Card

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.

Boethius

For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.

Seneca

The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.

Pete Wentz

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

Tom Robbins

They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.

Clint Eastwood

Everybody has something, that one thing they must do to feel happy. I think this is yours, and I want you to be happy. You don’t have to do it, but it’s here if you choose to come back to it.

Ilona Andrews

Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.

Ayn Rand

Mara, that's the life I want to give you. That's what I'm offering you. I want to fill you life with color and warmth. I want to fill it with light. Give me a chance

Francine Rivers

Joy came always after pain.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.

J. Maarten Troost

I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.

J. Cornell Michel

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.

Robert Anthony

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

David Mitchell

Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.

Stephen R. Covey

Remember, happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think.

Dale Carnegie

Success will be within your reach only when you start reaching out for it.

Stephen Richards

I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.

Marlene Dietrich

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

Pearl S. Buck

Shannon L. Alder

We have to go. I'm almost happy here.

Orson Scott Card

As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Judgment is a negative frequency.

Stephen Richards

When your back is to the wall and you are facing fear head on, the only way is forward and through it.

Stephen Richards

Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.

Irving Berlin

That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another....

Charles M. Schulz

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

Mark Strand

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Margaret Atwood

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.

Jeremy Bentham

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Willa Cather

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

Chuck Palahniuk

You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.''You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?''You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.

Alan Moore

You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.

Wayne W. Dyer

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.

Robin Williams

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.

Haruki Murakami

You can't buy happiness

Kurt Cobain

Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

Bertrand Russell

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

Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Happiness comes from within. It is not dependent on external things or on other people. You become vulnerable and can be easily hurt when your feelings of security and happiness depend on the behavior and actions of other people. Never give your power to anyone else.

Brian L. Weiss

I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence 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 in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.

Elizabeth Gilbert

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

Jane Austen

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Willa Cather

Exactly. How can you know it makes you happy if you’ve never experienced it?”“There are different kinds of happy,” she said. “Some kinds don’t need any proof.

Jennifer E. Smith

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

William Blake

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

Epicurus

Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity...When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.

Gretchen Rubin

How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

Michael Cunningham

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;Weep, and you weep alone;For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,But has trouble enough of its own.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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Happiness Quotes - Page 168

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