I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.
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.
What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
Avoid greatness; in a cottage there may be more real happiness than kings or their favorites enjoy.
I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Thus happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.
Joys too exquisite to last,
And yet more exquisite when past.
For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table.
Boys who, being mature in knowledge,
Pawn their experience to their present pleasure.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity to make or find.
True happiness ne'er entered at an eye;
True happiness resides in things unseen.
And, e'en while fashion's brightest arts decoy,
The heart, distrusting, asks if this be joy.
Let the fictitious sources of pleasure be as near as possible to the true.