HAPPINESS QUOTES XIV

quotations about Happiness

Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have the time. But the present time has one advantage over every other--it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


My capacity for happiness ... you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

DOUGLAS ADAMS

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


It may be obvious that this world has not been made merely for the ease and happiness of men, and obvious that we are not made to inhabit an earthly paradise, but the human heart can never cease to long for satisfaction of desire. This primal need has been the driving power to transform society and to improve the conditions of life. Even when men miss happiness as an experience, they feel they were made for it. The capacity for joy, which is their natural human instinct, demands fruition. To ask them to abandon the quest for happiness and to acknowledge it a phantom would be to make a mock of life.

HUGH BLACK

Happiness


As the sea is beautiful not only in calm but also in storm, so is happiness found not only in peace but also in strife.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts


We are most happy when least aware of happiness.

IVAN PANIN

Thoughts


To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The Conquest of Happiness


Happiness is a shy thing. Grief is blatant and advertising. If a boy cuts his finger he howls, proclaiming his woe. If he is eating pie he sits still and says nothing.

FRANK CRANE

"Hidden Happiness", Four Minute Essays


Our happiness, like our fortune, is often seriously injured by injudicious economy.

NORMAN MACDONALD

Maxims and Moral Reflections


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.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics


States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity


We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.

IMMANUEL KANT

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals


What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.

VOLTAIRE

A Philosophical Dictionary


Isn't it clear that bliss and envy--they are the numerator and the denominator of the fraction known as happiness.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We


All we are guaranteed is the pursuit of happiness. You have to catch up with it yourself.

GRENVILLE KLEISER

Dictionary of Proverbs


The happiest people are focused on living their own life (not someone else's) as well as possible.

HARRIET LERNER

Twitter post, January 2, 2015


Happiness in the present moment consists of very different states from happiness about the past and about the future, and itself embraces two very distinct kinds of things: pleasures and gratifications. The pleasures are delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, what philosophers call "raw feels"; ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, delight, mirth, exuberance, and comfort. They are evanescent, and they involve little, if any, thinking. The gratifications are activities we very much like doing, but they are not necessarily accompanied by any raw feelings at all. Rather, the gratifications engage us fully, we become immersed and absorbed in them, and we lose self-consciousness. Enjoying a great conversation, rock climbing, reading a good book, dancing, and making a slam dunk are all examples of activities in which time stops for us, our skills match the challenge, and we are in touch with our strengths. The gratifications last longer than the pleasures, they involve quite a lot of thinking and interpretation, they do not habituate easily, and they are undergirded by our strengths and virtues.

MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN

Authentic Happiness


That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Brave New World


Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Lady Chatterley's Lover


Happiness is just how you feel when you don't feel miserable.

JOHN LENNON

The Beatles Anthology


I've read countless books about happiness. The Art of Happiness, Hardwiring Happiness, The Secret--all the happiness hits. But rather than maintaining Polyanna-esque positivity, my personality could best be described as one of those old guys from The Muppet Show.

SUSIE MEISTER

"The Business of Happiness Is Booming but We're Still Miserable", The Observer, June 25, 2018