Beauty is a promise of happiness. But one that is rarely kept.
The first sentence by
StendhalWhen you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
Albert CamusIf only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Edith WhartonHappiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George BurnsThere is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
George SandHappiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping in your lap.
William BennettYou will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
Albert Camus
When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
Albert Camus
Albert Schweitzer:
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Albert Schweitzer:
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer:
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Algernon Black:
Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.
This entry continued ...
Allan K. Chalmers:
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Amy Lowell:
Happiness: We rarely feel it.
I would buy it, beg it, steal it,
Pay in coins of dripping blood
For this one transcendent good.
Anne Frank:
We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
Anne Frank:
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
Aristotle:
Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient
Benjamin Disraeli:
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Bertrand Russell:
The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
Buddha:
Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.
Carl Jung:
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Claude Monet:
The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.
Ecclesiastes:
For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
Edith Wharton:
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time.
Edward de Bono:
Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
Eric Hoffer:
You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
Felix Adler:
The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also.
Fran Leibowitz:
Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.
Francoise de Motteville:
The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.
Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
George Burns:
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Sand:
There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
HH the Dalai Lama:
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
HH the Dalai Lama:
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Helen Keller:
Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
Helen Keller:
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.
Helen Keller:
Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Henry David Thoreau:
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
Henry David Thoreau:
The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
Horace Friess:
All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.
Hubert H. Humphrey:
Here we are the way politics ought to be in America; the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose and the politics of joy.
James M. Barrie:
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.
James Oppenheim:
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
John Barrymore:
Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
John Milton:
The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
Kalidasa:
Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!
Kin Hubbard:
It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an' wealth have both failed.
Leo Buscaglia:
What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
Ludwig Wittgenstein:
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
M. Scott Peck:
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
Marcel Proust:
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Margaret Bonnano:
It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.
Mark Twain:
Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.
Mark Twain:
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
Mark Twain:
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
Mark Twain:
Happiness is a Swedish sunset -- it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it.
Mark Twain:
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
Martha Washington:
The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances.
Mohandas K. Gandhi:
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Norman MacEwan:
Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Oliver Wendell Holmes:
The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
Pearl S. Buck:
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Peyton Conway March:
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
To fill the hour -- that is happiness.
Ramona L. Anderson:
People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.
Robert Heinlein:
Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Louis Stevenson:
There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
Sophocles:
Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
Susan B. Anthony:
Independence is happiness.
Theodor Fontane:
Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong, and second -- and best -- in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night's sleep and not being hurt by new shoes.
Thich Nhat Hanh:
Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
Thomas Jefferson:
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
Thomas Jefferson:
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life; and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine.
Willa Cather:
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something completely great.
Consider the following. We humans are social beings. We come into the world as the result of others' actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others' activities. For this reason it is hardly surprising that most of our happiness arises in the context of our relationships with others.
Nor is it so remarkable that our greatest joy should come when we are motivated by concern for others. But that is not all. We find that not only do altruistic actions bring about happiness but they also lessen our experience of suffering. Here I am not suggesting that the individual whose actions are motivated by the wish to bring others' happiness necessarily meets with less misfortune than the one who does not. Sickness, old age, mishaps of one sort or another are the same for us all. But the sufferings which undermine our internal peace -- anxiety, doubt, disappointment -- these things are definitely less. In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense.
What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others' happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others' happiness.
Ethics for a New Millennium,
Dalai Lama