You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts, while adversity is often as the rain of spring.
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
de Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier
A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
Of mortals there is no one who is happy. If wealth flows in upon one, one may be perhaps Luckier than one's neighbor, but still not happy.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy.
Different men seek after happiness indifferent ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.
The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.
It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; perty and wealth have both failed.
I can sympathise with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Happiness is not a reward-it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
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.
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
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.
No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
It is better to be happy for a momen tand be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
If thou be industrious to procure wealth, be generous in the disposal of it. Man never is so happy as when he giveth happiness unto another.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes.
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it files Lives in eternity's sun rise.
The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.