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Quotations by Subject: Happiness
(Related Subjects: Laughter)
Showing quotations 21 to 50 of 60 quotations in our collections

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.: George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), "Man and Superman" (1903), act I
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.: George Burns (1896 - 1996)
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.: Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.: Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
Man is the artificer of his own happiness.: Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Journal, January 21, 1838
If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us least live so as to deserve it.: Immanuel Hermann Fichte
I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.: J. D. Salinger (1919 - )
Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications are not your life.: J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Address, 2008
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.: James Oppenheim
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.: Jean Houston
Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.: Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.: John Berry, Flight of White Crows
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, 2005
The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.: Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, 2005
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.: Joseph Addison (1672 - 1719), The Spectator, March 17, 1911
Laughing is the sensation of feeling good all over and showing it principally in one spot.: Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)
It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.: Kin Hubbard (1868 - 1930)
Seek not happiness too greedily, and be not fearful of happiness.: Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)
I’ve decided that the key to happiness is low expectations.: Laura Moncur, Merriton, 06-04-08
I've grown to realize the joy that comes from little victories is preferable to the fun that comes from ease and the pursuit of pleasure.: Lawana Blackwell, The Courtship of the Vicar's Daughter, 1998
I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!: Louise Bogan
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.: Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)
Very little is needed to make a happy life.: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 AD - 180 AD), Meditations
In order for people to be happy, sometimes they have to take risks. It's true these risks can put them in danger of being hurt.: Meg Cabot, The Boy Next Door, 2002
When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.: Nicole Kidman, in The Scotsman
I define joy as a sustained sense of well-being and internal peace - a connection to what matters.: Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), O Magazine
In order to be truly happy, you must live along with, and you must stand for something larger than yourself.: Oprah Winfrey (1954 - ), Stanford Commencement Adress, 2008
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.: Oscar Levant (1906 - 1972)
And isn't that, at it's core, what the princess fantasy is about for all of us? "Princess" is how we tell little girls that they are special, precious. "Princess" is the wish that we could protect them from pain, that they would never know sorrow, that they will live happily ever after ensconces in lace and innocence.: Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, 2011
No man is happy who does not think himself so.: Publilius Syrus (~100 BC), Maxims

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