Happiness Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Happiness is a state of mind. You can be happy or you can be unhappy.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.

Bertrand Russell

The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

Thomas Jefferson

Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities.

I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowlege among the people. no other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness.

Thomas Jefferson

You're not going to be different... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

A thing chosen always as an end and never as a means we call absolutely final. Now happiness above all else appears to be absolutely final in this sense, since we always choose it for its own sake and never as a means to something else.

Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.

Alexandre Dumas

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Industry, commerce and security are the surest roads to the happiness and prosperity of people.

Thomas Jefferson

To sit at one's table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a Squeezer pen - that is true happiness.

Winston Churchill

Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety.

Bertrand Russell

Foolish is my happiness, and foolish things will it speak: it is still too young—so have patience with it!

Friedrich Nietzsche

A little misery, at times, makes one appreciate happiness more.

Were I to buy this life of pleasure and this only chance at happiness with a few little dangers, where would be the harm? And wouldn't it still be fortunate to find a weak excuse to give her proof of my love?

The sciences, which have revealed so many secrets and destroyed so many prejudices, are destined to render us yet greater service. New truths, new discoveries will unveil secrets still more essential to the happiness of men — but only if we give our esteem to the scientists and our protection to the sciences.

Napoleon I of France

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness as well as virtue consists in mediocrity.

May not we then confidently pronounce that man happy who realizes complete goodness in action, and is adequately furnished with external goods? Or should we add, that he must also be destined to go on living not for any casual period but throughout a complete lifetime in the same manner, and to die accordingly, because the future is hidden from us, and we conceive happiness as an end, something utterly and absolutely final and complete? If this is so, we shall pronounce those of the living who possess and are destined to go on possessing the good things we have specified to be supremely blessed, though on the human scale of bliss.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory... we are all kings in exile.

G. K. Chesterton

A sense of contentment is a key factor for attaining happiness

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama