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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:

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

Christopher Morley Where the Blue Begins (1922)

Magnificent spectacle of human happiness.

Sydney Smith

Happiness is not an end — it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.

Dinah Craik A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

The only way to make people good, is to make them happy.

Dinah Craik A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.

José Martí Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)

That Action is best, which procures the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers; and that worst, which, in like manner, occasions Misery.

Francis Hutcheson An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725)

Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.

John Buchan A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906)

They who are pleased themselves must always please.

James Thomson The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.

Rollo May Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

I am every day more convinced that happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth.

Josemaría Escrivá The Forge (1987)

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Thomas Jefferson

There's a hope for every woe,
And a balm for every pain,
But the first joys of our heart
Come never back again!

Robert Gilfillan

There is a pleasure which is born of pain.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton The Wanderer (1859)

I should say that happiness is being where one is and not wanting to be anywhere else.

Michael Frayn Summerchild in A Landing on the Sun (1991)

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Hosea Ballou

Now, happiness consists in activity: such is the constitution of our nature: it is a running stream and not a stagnant pool.

John Mason Good The Book of Nature (1826)

Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now (1997)

An overflowing pot must be emptied before anything new can be added. If you cling to the sorrows of the past, how can you make space for the happiness and joy of the present?

Sanu Sharma

Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.

E. M. Forster Selected Letters (1983)

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

Rabindranath Tagore The Gardener (1915)

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