1,113 Happiness Quotes

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

Those who thank God much are the truly wealthy. So our inner happiness depends not on what we experience but on the degree of our gratitude to God, whatever the experience.

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.

Taking a year off and going to school was the best thing I could have done after The Princess Diaries. It taught me that I don't need Hollywood or a job to make me happy.

Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you.

You've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Even when I'm happy and successful, life still goes on.

I too have known joy and sadness, and, on the whole, I prefer joy.

Even a meaningless life may contain many good breakfasts.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it's the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It's probably the most important thing in a person.

It can never be wrong to give pleasure.

Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.

Having a good time together is the essence of lovingness and the best means of increasing it.

The loving person makes other people feel good, and he is usually a happy person himself. He is able to form strong, long-lasting friendships.

The man who laughs has simply not yet had the terrible news.

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Joy of life... depends upon a certain spontaneity in regard to sex. Where sex is repressed, only work remains, and a gospel of work for work's sake never produced any work worth doing.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.

I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.

The one who is happy can never get too early out of bed.

Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.

The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

It is sweet to dance to violins When Love and Life are fair: To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes Is delicate and rare: But it is not sweet with nimble feet To dance upon the air!

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.

Ecstasy is our very nature, not to be ecstatic is simply unnecessary. To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is real hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against the nature. You are going upstream - that's what misery is.

Happiness to me is getting stoned.

His was a life which lacked, perhaps, the sublimer emotions which raised Man to the level of the gods, but it was undeniably an extremely happy one. He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated. His name, when he died, would not live for ever in England's annals; he was spared the pain of worrying about this by the fact that he had no desire to live for ever in England's annals. He was possibly as nearly contented a human being can be in this century of alarms and excursions.

The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.

There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.

To serve is beautiful, but only if it done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

I'm saying, 'This I believe: I believe there is no God.' Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

He is the happy wanderer, who goes, Singing upon the way, with eyes awake To every scene, with ears alert to take The sweetness of all sounds; who loves and knows The secrets of the highway, and the rose Holds fairer for the wounds that briars make.

We shall lodge at the sign of the Grave, you say; Well, the road is a long one we trudge, my friend, So why should we grieve at the break of the day? Let us sing, let us drink, let us love, let us play,-- We can keep our sights for the journey's end.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilized music in the world.

Cueillez des aujourd'hui les roses de la vie.

Happy is he who does not desire a thing.

They say that it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise, like moderately rich and just moody?

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

What a wonderful world it is that has girls in it!

And now impatiently despairest, see How nought is changed: Joy's wisdom is attired Splended for others' eyes if not for thee: Not love or beauty or youth from earth is fled: If they delite thee not, 'tis thou art dead.

So sweet love seemed that April morn, When first we kissed beside the thorn, So strangely sweet, it was not strange We thought that love could never change.

Repudiation of pleasur is a reason'd folly of imperfection. Ther is no motiv can rebate or decompose the intrinsic joy of activ life, whereon all function whatsoever in man is based.

The name of happiness is but a wider term for the unalloy'd conditions of the Pleasur of Life, attendant on all function, and not to be deny'd to th' soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature spiritual is by definition unnatural.

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!

Oh, to be in England Now that April's there.

How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses Forever in joy!

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Now no joy but lacks salt, That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

First there's the children's house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad.

Reason, Observation and Experience - the Holy Trinity of Science - have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us. In this belief we are content to live and die. If by any possibility the existence of a power superior to, and independent of, nature shall be demonstrated, there will then be time enough to kneel. Until then, let us stand erect.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

I am now speaking of the phenomena of nature. I believe, as much as I believe that I live, that the reason a thing is right is because it tends to the happiness of mankind. I believe, as much as I believe that I live, that on the average the good man is not only the happier man, but that no man is happy who is not good.

I hate above all things a cross man. What right has he to murder the sunshine of a day? What right has he to assassinate the joy of life?

It is not necessary to be great to be happy; it is not necessary to be rich to be just and generous and to have a heart filled with divine affection.

One laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still.

The great question is not, who died right, but who lived right? There is infinitely more responsibility in living than in dying. The moment of death is the most unimportant moment of life. Nothing can be done then. It is a moment when life ceases to be of value. While living, while you have health and strength, you can augment the happiness of your fellow-men; and the man who has made others happy need not be afraid to die.

Women are far more intelligent - some of them are no longer the slaves either of husbands, or priests. They are beginning to think for themselves. They can see no good reason why they should sacrifice their lives to please Popes or Gods. They are no longer deceived by theological prophecies. They are not willing to suffer here, with the hope of being happy beyond the clouds - they want their happiness now.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say 'give them up,' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

There ys no solas undyr hevene Of al that a man may nevene That shuld a man so moche glew As a gode womman that loveth trew.

Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy.

Most of the appearance of mirth in the world is not mirth, it is art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise.

Walt Disney World is tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney... and to the talents, the dedication, and the loyalty of the entire Disney organization that made Walt Disney's dream come true. May Walt Disney World bring Joy and Inspiration and New Knowledge to all who come to this happy place... a Magic Kingdom where the young at heart of all ages can laugh and play and learn -- together.

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame; And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!

To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them.

It will not hurt me when I am old, A running tide where moonlight burned Will not sting me like silver snakes; The years will make me sad and cold, It is the happy heart that breaks.