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happiness - happiness
3 - happiness 4
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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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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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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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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 |
But what is happiness
except the simple harmony
between a person and the life he or she leads?
Albert Camus |
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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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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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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 or her 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 Ive 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."
tdw |
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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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Pleasure and
happiness are too often equated with being the same;
in reality they are very different. Pleasure comes. It
also goes. It is
the flavor and content of many of the impressions we encounter in
our lives. Happiness has not so much to do with the content or
impressions of our experiences; but with our capacity to find balance
and peace amid the myriad impressions of our lives. Treasuring
happiness and freedom, we learn to live our lives with openness and
serenity.
Christina Feldman
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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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The Buddha explained that the source of true happiness is living in
ease and
freedom, fully experiencing the wonders of life. Happiness is
being aware of
what is going on in the present moment, free from both clinging and
aversion.
A happy person cherishes the wonders taking place in the present
moment--
a cool breeze, the morning sky, a golden flower, a violet bamboo tree,
the
smile of a child. A happy person can appreciate these things
without being
bound by them. . . . because one understands that a flower will wilt,
one is not
sad when it does. A happy person understands the nature of birth
and death.
His or her happiness is true happiness, and this person does not
even worry about or fear his or her own death.
Thich Nhat Hanh |
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