Virtues

"The nicest thing about being happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again."

"If you want to be happy, be!"

"Perfect the Will, the Mind, Feeling, their corporeal organs and their material tools; be useful to yourselves, to your own ones, and to others; and Happiness, insofar as it exists on this earth, will come of itself.""

"Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible."

"Happiness is a battle to be waged and not a feeling to be awaited."

"Heaven to mankind impartial we confess, If all are equal in their happiness; But mutual wants this happiness increase, All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace."

"Fix'd to no spot is Happiness sincere; 'Tis nowhere to be found, or ev'rywhere; 'Tis never to be bought, but always free."

"Oh happiness! our being's end and aim! Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate'er thy name; That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh, For which we bear to live, or dare to die."

"If they (children) smash, the flower vase assumes a smile while turning into pieces. For a chance to be spilled by their hands, anything they hold gets spilled itself full of happiness. For a chance to play with them, water forgets about its own colourlessness."

"What need is there of long journeying on the land or voyaging on the seas to seek and search for virtue, whose roots have been set by their Maker ever so near us. ... By constant care they rear the virtues into stems rising up to heaven, saplings ever blooming and immortal, bearing and never ceasing to bear the fruits of happiness, or as some hold, not so much bearing as being in themselves that happiness."

"Happiness is only real when shared."

"I could tell you a long story (and you know it as well as I do) about what is to be gained by beating the enemy back. What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she realty is, and should fall in love with her. When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. If they ever failed in an enterprise, they made up their minds that at any rate the city should not find their courage lacking to her, and they gave to her the best contribution that they could. They gave her their lives, to her and to all of us, and for their own selves they won praises that never grow old, the most splendid of sepulchers — not the sepulchre in which their bodies are laid, but where their glory remains eternal in men's minds, always there on the right occasion to stir others to speech or to action. For famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people's hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them. Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous."

"They have a secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad, and which arises from the sense of their constant unhappiness. They have another secret instinct, a remnant of the greatness of our original nature, which teaches them that happiness in reality consists only in rest and not in stir."

"Life does not always meet our expectations, but that should not prevent us from seeking what happiness we can."

"For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table."

"What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."

"The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser."

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

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

"In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry? You make it double. Don't worry, be happy."

"People often don't appreciate how complex happiness may be. They think happy people are shallow, which can be so wrong. It's actually far easier to be unhappy than it is to be happy. It requires more effort, more understanding, more character to be consistently happy."

"Tolerant people are the happiest, so why not get rid of prejudices that hold you back?"

"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."

"Three ounces are necessary, first of Patience, Then, of Repose & Peace; of Conscience A pound entire is needful; of Pastimes of all sorts, too, Should be gathered as much as the hand can hold; Of Pleasant Memory & of Hope three good drachms There must be at least. But they should moistened be With a liquor made from True Pleasures which rejoice the heart. Then of Love's Magic Drops, a few— But use them sparingly, for they may bring a flame Which naught but tears can drown, Grind the whole and mix therewith of Merriment, an ounce To even. Yet all this may not bring happiness Except in your Orisons you lift your voice To Him who holds the gift of health."

"The self is a simplification of the notion of soul, created to serve the purposes of the modern sciences of psychology and economics, both of which want you to be happy in a simple, straightforward way they can count."

"Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One's own karma, one's own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever."

"The rays of happiness, like those of light, are colorless when unbroken."

"To be strong Is to be happy!"

"We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart."

"It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go — let it die away — go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow — and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all around them."

"If a man ... does not understand that the object of his life is progress, that God’s Will for him is that he shall grow to be something better and nobler than he is now, then also he will bring unhappiness and suffering upon himself, because he will be likely to live for the lower side of life only, and that lower side of life never finally satisfies the inner man."

"If a man lives under the delusion that he can do anything that he likes, and that the effect of his actions will never recoil upon himself, he will most certainly find that some of these actions eventually involve him in unhappiness and suffering."

"From popular and classic works of fiction, to the news media, to everyday conversation, the social world is replete with mentions of God. The current findings suggest that this exposure may have broad societal consequences for fundamental psychological processes of self-regulation, which in turn underlie much of health, happiness, and human productivity."

"And yet it is a wasted heart : It is a wasted mind That seeks not in the inner world Its happiness to find ; For happiness is like the bird That broods above its nest, And finds beneath its folded wings, Life's dearest, and its best."

"To use the established phrase, three months of uninterrupted happiness glided away—a phrase, though in frequent use, whose accuracy I greatly doubt ; there being no such thing as uninterrupted happiness any how or any where."

"The great happiness-secret, after all, is division. How dare we, in this vain, fleeting world, concentrate our whole freight of interest in one frail bark ?"

"I think one of the best ways to face this problem of self-centeredness is to discover some cause and some purpose, some loyalty outside of yourself and give yourself to that something. The best way to handle it is not to suppress the ego but to extend the ego into objectively meaningful channels. And so many people are unhappy because they aren’t doing anything. They’re self-centered because they aren’t doing anything. They haven’t given themselves to anything and they just move around in their little circles."

"I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending. Perversely, I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all -- absolutely not at all -- interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite. ... I feel it’s my business to make everyone a little less happy."

"“Does your work make you happy?” he asked. “I don’t know what happy means anymore. I thought I was happy with Chuck and he was cheating on me. Isn’t happy just our capacity for self-deception?”"

"A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships."

"Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they could be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing."

"Once more I realized to what an extent earthly happiness is made to the measure of man. It is not a rare bird which we must pursue at one moment in heaven, at the next in our minds. Happiness is a domestic bird found in our own courtyards."

"How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. … All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart."

"Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been."

"True happiness goes unnoticed."

"Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness."

"Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need, since the Kingdom of the heavens belongs to them."

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

"Believing that the happiness of mankind is best promoted by the useful pursuits of peace, that on these alone a stable prosperity can be founded, that the evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come, I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side."

"The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have past at home in the bosom of my family…. public emploiment contributes neither to advantage nor happiness. It is but honorable exile from one's family and affairs."