quotations and passages about happiness

Happiness is not a possession to be prized,
it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

Daphne DuMaurier

The secret to happiness is this: Let your interest be as wide as possible,
and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you
be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Bertrand Russell

We should tell ourselves
once and for all that it is
the first duty of the soul
to become as happy, complete, independent, and great as lies
in its power.
To this end we may sacrifice
even the passion for sacrifice,
for sacrifice never should be
the means of ennoblement,
but only the sign
of being ennobled.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Happiness comes of the capacity
to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Storm Jameson

To be able to find joy in another's joy:
that is the secret of happiness.

George Bernanos

Montesquieu

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished;
but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult,
for we believe others to be happier than they are.

Happiness is a sunbeam which may pass
through a thousand bosoms
without losing a particle of its original ray;
nay, when it strikes a kindred heart,
like the converged light upon a mirror, it
reflects itself with redoubled brightness.
It is not perfected till it is shared.

Jane Porter

I accept life unconditionally. Life holds so much--so much
to be happy about always. Most people ask for happiness
on condition. Happiness can be felt only if you don't set conditions.

Artur Rubinstein

One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about your friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then, if we do that, we will never suffer a moment's boredom.

Gerald Brenan

Everyday happiness means getting up in the morning and you can't wait to finish your breakfast. You can't wait to do your exercises.
You can't wait to put on your clothes. You can't wait to get out--
and you can't wait to come home, because the soup is hot.

George Burns

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions--the little
soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look,
a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals
of pleasurable and genial feeling.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Norman Vincent Peale

Everybody really knows what to do to have his life filled with joy. What is it?
Quit hating people; start loving them. Quit being mad at people; start liking them.
Quit doing wrong; quit being filled with fear. Quit thinking about yourself
and go out and do something for other people. Everybody knows what
you have to do to be happy. But the wisdom of the test lies in the final words:
"If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them."

When one door of happiness closes another opens;
but often we look so long at the closed door
that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

Helen Keller

If you observe really happy people you will find them
building a boat, writing a symphony, educating their children, growing double dahlias in their gardens, or looking for
dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. They will not be searching
for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled
under the radiator. They will not be striving for it as a goal
in itself. They will have become aware that they are happy
in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.

W. Beran
Wolfe

The happiness which brings enduring worth to life is not
the superficial happiness that is dependent on circumstances.
It is the happiness and contentment that fills the soul even
in the midst of the most distressing circumstances and the
most bitter environment. It is the kind of happiness that grins
when things go wrong and smiles through the tears. The happiness
for which our souls ache is one undisturbed by success or failure,
one which will root deeply inside us and give inward relaxation,
peace, and contentment, no matter what the surface problems may be.
That kind of happiness stands in need of no outward stimulus.

Billy Graham

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One is happy as a result of one's own efforts--once one knows
the necessary ingredients of happiness--simple tastes,
a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point,
love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience.

George Sand

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.

Andre Gide

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable,
and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
to listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart;
to bear on cheerfully, do all bravely, awaiting occasions, worry never;
in a word to, like the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.

William Ellery Channing

W.L. Shirer

Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition
of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is difficult to achieve,
especially in these trying times. It takes reflection, and contemplation and self-discipline.

Caring about others, running the risk of feeling,
and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.

Rabbi Harold Kushner

To be kind to all, to like many and love a few, to be needed and wanted
by those we love, is certainly the nearest we can come to happiness.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut,
a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. . . . All that is required to feel
that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.

Nikos Kazantzakis
from Zorba the Greek

Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued,
is always just beyond your grasp, but which,
if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Robert Frost

Sometimes our thoughts turn back toward a corner in a forest,
or the end of a bank, or an orchard powdered with flowers,
seen but a single time on some happy day, yet remaining
in our hearts and leaving in soul and body an unappeased desire
which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that we have just
rubbed elbows with happiness.

Guy de Maupassant

Happiness not only needs no justification, but it is also
the only final test of whether what I am doing is right for me.
Only of course happiness is not the same as pleasure;
it includes the pain of losing as well as the pleasure of finding.

Joanna Field

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging
to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form. . . happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.

Charles L. Morgan

Many run about after happiness like an absent-minded man
hunting for his hat, while it is in his hand or on his head.

James Sharp

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands,
like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own, it too could
wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records. . .
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands,
and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.

Naomi Shihab Nye
from "So Much Happiness"

One must never look for happiness:
one meets it by the way. . .

Isabelle Eberhardt

If you want
to be happy, be.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that people are happy so long as t hey choose to be happy, and no one can stop them.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The people who are unhappy when they are poor would be unhappy
if they were rich, and they who are happy in a palace in Paris
would be happy in a dug-out on the frontier of Dakota. There are
as many unhappy rich people as there are unhappy poor people.
Every heart knows its own bitterness and its own joy.
Not that wealth and what it brings is not desirable—
books, travel, leisure, comfort, the best food and clothing,
agreeable companionship—but all these do not necessarily
bring happiness and may coexist with the deepest wretchedness,
while adversity and penury, exile and privation
are not incompatible with the loftiest exaltation of the soul.

John J. Ingalls

Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies
in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used,
the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which,
shirking pain, misses happiness as well.

Mary Cholmondeley