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Happiness Quotes

Most happiness quotes online are cheerful. The sourced ones on this page often are not. Bertrand Russell wrote in Sceptical Essays (1928) that after enjoying ourselves, our greatest pleasure is preventing others from enjoying themselves. Macaulay’s History of England (1849) has the Puritan who hated bear-baiting not because it hurt the bear but because it pleased the spectators. Tom Robbins gave the most practical advice in a 2002 interview: the key to self-generated happiness is refusing to take yourself too seriously.

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive” is credited to Marcus Aurelius and flagged as misattributed. “No man is happy who does not think himself so” is credited to Publilius Syrus and marked disputed.

Random quote on Happiness

Most quoted on happiness:

Perfect happiness I believe was never intended by the deity to be the lot of any one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it, is what I as stedfastly believe.

Thomas Jefferson

I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart — to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

Capacity for joy
Admits temptation.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh (1856)

Sing out my soul, thy songs of joy;
Such as a happy bird will sing,
Beneath a Rainbow's lovely arch,
In early spring.

William Henry Davies

Joy, thou spark from Heav'n immortal,
Daughter of Elysium!
Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing
Goddess, to thy shrine we come.
Thy sweet magic brings together
What stern Custom spreads afar;
All men become brothers
Where thy happy wing-beats are.

Friedrich Schiller An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count.

Harvey Mansfield How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science (2007)

The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. p. 118

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

Ah, no! the conquest was obtained with ease;
He pleased you by not studying to please.

George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton

Joy, in Nature's wide dominion,
Mightiest cause of all is found;
And 'tis joy that moves the pinion,
When the wheel of time goes round

Friedrich Schiller An die Freude (Ode to Joy; or Hymn to Joy) (1785)

Oh happiness! our being's end and aim!
Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate'er thy name;
That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die.

Alexander Pope

A pure mind is the source of happiness.

Amit Ray

Oh, Mirth and Innocence! Oh, Milk and Water!
Ye happy mixtures of more happy days!

Lord Byron Beppo (1818)

At Earth's great market where Joy is trafficked in,
Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth.

Alan Seeger

Does a young man, rejected by his first love, declare that love does not exist? The young man says to himself: “I’ll find someone better able to understand what I feel. And then I will be happy for the rest of my days."

Paulo Coelho Manuscript Found in Accra (2012)

A blossom full of promise is life's joy,
That never comes to fruit; hope, for a time,
Suns the young floweret in its gladsome light,
And it looks flourishing—a little while,
Tis past, we know not whither, but 'tis gone—

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?...Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.

Isabel Allende The Japanese Lover (2015)

And yet it is a wasted heart :
It is a wasted mind
That seeks not in the inner world
Its happiness to find ;
For happiness is like the bird
That broods above its nest,
And finds beneath its folded wings,
Life's dearest, and its best.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Ye seek for happiness—alas, the day!
Ye find it not in luxury nor in gold,
Nor in the fame, nor in the envied sway
For which, O willing slaves to Custom old,
Severe taskmistress! ye your hearts have sold.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them.

Nikos Kazantzakis The Saviors of God (1923)

don't drain the cup of joy in a single sip.

Rosario Castellanos

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