Happiness Quotes

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For some identify happiness with virtue, some with practical wisdom, others with a kind of philosophic wisdom, others with these, or one of these, accompanied by pleasure or not without pleasure; while others include also external prosperity. Now … it is not probable that these should be entirely mistaken, but rather that they should be right in at least some one respect or even in most respects.

While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.

But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness.

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

Men possessing minds which are morose, solemn, and inflexible enjoy generally a greater share of dignity than of happiness.

By heaven we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and endless in duration.

Benjamin Franklin

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

A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of one's life, the foundation of happiness or misery.

George Washington

With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.

Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.

Alexandre Dumas

Inner peace is the key: if you have inner peace, the external problems do not affect your deep sense of peace and tranquility. In that state of mind you can deal with situations with calmness and reason, while keeping your inner happiness. That is very important. Without this inner peace, no matter how comfortable your life is materially, you may still be worried, disturbed or unhappy because of circumstances.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

Thomas Jefferson

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not.

Dearest,
I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that.
But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that.
V.

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.

Bertrand Russell

If we want to find happiness, let's stop thinking about gratitude or ingratitude and give for the inner joy of giving.

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.

Seneca the Younger

My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

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.

Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.

Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau