Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.
It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.
A wise woman recognizes when her life is out of balance and summons the courage to act to correct it, she knows the meaning of true generosity, happiness is the reward for a life lived in harmony, with a courage and grace.
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.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Live by this credo: have a little laugh at life and look around you for happiness instead of sadness. Laughter has always brought me out of unhappy situations.
I do believe that if you haven't learnt about sadness, you cannot appreciate happiness.
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.
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.
Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.
Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.
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.
Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
When you're passionate about something, you want it to be all it can be. But in the endgame of life, I fundamentally believe the key to happiness is letting go of that idea of perfection.
The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.
We're taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they're of equal value to happiness, excitement and inspiration.
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.
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.