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Happiness
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Why is it that so many people are afraid to
admit they are happy?
William Lyon Phelps |
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happiness - happiness
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Those who decide to use leisure as a means
of
mental development, who love good music, good books,
good plays, good company, good conversation--what
are
they? They are the happiest people in the world.
William Lyon Phelps |
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It is not how much we
have, but how much we enjoy,
that makes happiness.
Charles Haddon
Spurgeon
Where your pleasure is, there is
your treasure; where your treasure, there your heart;
where your heart, there your happiness.
St. Augustine
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My
creed is this:
Happiness is the only good.
The place to be happy is here.
The time to be happy is now.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert G. Ingersoll |
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Happiness is a wine of the rarest
vintage
and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
Logan Pearsall Smith |
Albert Camus
But what is happiness
except the simple harmony between a person and the life he or she leads? |
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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 will have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer |
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John
Dewey |
To find
out what one is fitted to do
and to secure an opportunity
to do it
is the key to happiness. |
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Unquestionably, it is possible to do
without happiness;
it is done voluntarily by nineteen-twentieths
of humankind.
John Stuart Mill |
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The art
of living does not consist in preserving and clinging
to
a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness
to change its form without being disappointed by the
change;
happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow
up.
Charles L. Morgan |
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The first recipe for
happiness is:
Avoid too lengthy meditations on the
past.
Andre Maurois |
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If this world
affords true happiness, it is to be found
in a home where
love and confidence increase with the years, where the
necessities of life come without severe strain, where
luxuries enter only after their cost
has been carefully
considered. |
A.
Edward Newton |
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For most of life,
nothing wonderful happens. If you don't enjoy
getting up
and working and finishing your work and
sitting down to a meal
with family or friends, then the
chances are you're not going
to be very happy. If
someone bases his happiness or unhappiness
on major
events like a great new job, huge amounts of money,
a
flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person
isn't going
to be happy much of the time. If, on
the other hand, happiness depends
on a good breakfast,
flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap,
then we are more
likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.
Andy
Rooney |
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i try very hard to learn from people who are unhappy,
for i believe that they are the people who can best teach
me how to be happy. ironically enough, these are
often the people who put up the greatest facade of
happiness--always bright and cheerful among company, but
when you talk to them alone, you find a great deal of
discontent or frustration or anger or discouragement.
i've found that happiness isn't all that
difficult. it's been very important for me to do
several things on my path to happiness, and here they are,
in no particular order:
be true to myself, my principles, and
my faith. this faithfulness to myself keeps me from
beating myself up over actions that i'm not proud of.
if i base my actions on principle and truly follow
that principle, i won't engage in the self-denigration
that i've seen so many others (especially alcoholics)
engage in.
give up the thoughts of being HAPPY.
somehow our culture has turned happiness into this
unobtainable permanently ecstatic state--a result of too
many people in entertainment and advertising who have no
idea of what happiness truly is trying to tell us how to
be happy. they're not the problem--the problem is,
we listen.
not worry about things or events.
as andy rooney says above, happiness has less to do
with major events or the versions of success fed to us by
unhappy people from hollywood or madison avenue than with acceptance and
awareness and appreciation of the little things in our
lives, like this wonderful computer that allows me to
build this website and share these great people's words
with so many others. and it's one of the cheaper
computers, certainly not a top-of-the-line model. but
it does a great job, and i love it, and i don't spend
time wishing for anything more.
focus on others and their needs,
without getting obsessive about it and robbing myself of
quiet time and recreational time. i'm useless to
others if i'm not rested and in full command of my senses.
i work at balancing what i give of time and effort
with what i need to keep going and to stay happy. i
often say yes when people ask me to help, but i often say
no, too. it depends on where i am and how it will
affect other aspects of my life. some of the least
happy people i know give so much of themselves that they're
always tired and cranky, and they often start resenting
the very people they're supposed to help.
find my niches. i would love to
play the guitar and piano, but i'm not that good at
either. i am good at other things, so instead of
spending tons of time trying to learn a little bit of
everything, i try to focus on my strengths. i can
play chords on the guitar and enjoy it, but to spend
hours and hours trying to get really good--well, there
are plenty of great guitar players out there who can make
up for my absence in the world of music.
all in all, i know that happiness is
obtainable, and the first quotation of this page is a
very telling one. ask yourself if you don't have
everything in your life that can make you happy, and then
ask yourself if you're happy. look at yourself
through the eyes of someone who doesn't have what you
have--material goods, health, intelligence, ability,
creativity--and hear that person telling you, "i
would be so happy if i had only a part of what you have."
and don't answer, "yes, but. . ." answer,
"you're right--i do have many gifts. i'll try
to be happy with them." |
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Happy the
person who has learned the
cause
of things and has put under his or her feet
all fear,
inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of
greed.
Virgil |
Happiness is not in our
circumstances, but in ourselves. It is not something we
see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire.
Happiness is something we are.
John B. Sheerin |
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Just as a cautious
businessperson avoids
investing
all his or her capital in one concern,
so wisdom would
probably admonish us also
not to anticipate all our
happiness from one quarter.
Sigmund Freud |
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People who postpone
happiness are like children who try chasing rainbows
in
an effort to find the pot of gold at the rainbow's end. .
. .
Your life will never be fulfilled until you are happy
here and now.
Ken Keyes, Jr.
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Happiness
in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally.
Make it
the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild-goose
chase,
and is never attained. Follow some other object,
and very possibly
we may find that we have caught
happiness without dreaming of it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne |
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Happiness sneaks in through a
door
you didn't know you left open.
John Barrymore |
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Happiness
is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.
Aristotle |
To live
happily is an inward power of the soul.
Marcus
Aurelius |
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People of the noblest
dispositions think themselves happiest
when others share their
happiness with them.
Jeremy Taylor |
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It is neither
wealth nor splendor, but tranquility
and occupation, which give
happiness.
Thomas
Jefferson |
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Happiness is
intrinsic, it's an internal thing.
When you build it into
yourself,
no external circumstances can take it away.
Leo Buscaglia |
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The
happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that
which
we obtain from our surroundings. . . .
The world in which a person
lives shapes itself chiefly
by the way in which he or she looks at it.
Arthur
Schopenhauer |
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Your success
and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents
of life.
The great enduring realities are love and
service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps
our purpose warm and
our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy
and
you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.
Helen Keller |
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It would be a great thing if people could be brought
to realize
that they can never add to the sum of their happiness by
doing wrong.
John Lubbock |
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We
cannot be happy until we can love ourselves
without egotism and our
friends without tyranny.
Cyril
Connolly |
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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 |
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To
be happy is easy enough if we give ourselves, forgive others,
and live
with thanksgiving. No self-centered person, no ungrateful soul
can ever be happy, much less make anyone else happy.
Life is
giving, not getting.
Joseph
Fort Newton |
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The fountain of
contentment must spring up in the mind.
They who have so little
knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness
by changing
anything but their own dispositions will waste their lives
in
fruitless efforts and multiply the grief which they purpose to remove.
Samuel
Johnson |
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We
have no more right to consume happiness
without producing it than to consume
wealth without producing it.
George
Bernard Shaw |
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Buried deep in the maze
of commonplace, the pearl of true happiness lies.
And those who rejoice in little things, find the pathway that leads to
the prize.
Lucy M. Thompson |
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Simply
to have all the necessities of life and three meals a day will
not bring happiness.
Happiness is hidden in the unnecessary and in those
impractical things that bring delight to the inner person. . .
. When we lack proper time
for the simple pleasures of life,
for the enjoyment of eating, drinking, playing, creating,
visiting friends, and watching children at play, then we have
missed
the purpose of life.
Not on bread alone do we live but on all these human
and heart-hungry luxuries.
Ed Hays |
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May
we never let the things we can’t have or don’t have
or shouldn’t
have spoil our enjoyment of the things we do have
and can have.
As we value our happiness, let us not forget it.
One of the greatest lessons in life is learning to be happy
without the things we cannot or should not have.
Richard L. Evans |
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Happiness is the greatest paradox in nature.
It can grow in any soil,
live under any conditions. It defies environment. The
reason for this
is that it does not come from without but from within. Whenever
you see people seeking happiness outside themselves, you can be sure
they have never yet found it.
Forman Lincicome |
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The
real secret of happiness is simply this: to be willing to live and let
live, and to know very clearly in one's own mind that the unpardonable
sin
is to be an unpleasant person.
Galen Starr Ross |
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We
act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements
of life, when all that we need to make us really happy
is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley |
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Happiness
is a present attitude--not a future condition.
Hugh
Prather |
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