β
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
β
β
Oscar Wilde (The Happy Prince and Other Stories)
β
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson
β
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.
β
β
Helen Keller
β
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
β
β
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
β
Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.
β
β
Dr. Seuss (Happy Birthday to You!)
β
Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.
β
β
Abraham Lincoln
β
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
β
β
Marthe Troly-Curtin (Phrynette Married)
β
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
β
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
β
β
Ernest Hemingway (The Garden of Eden)
β
I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)
β
You 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.
β
β
Albert Camus
β
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
β
β
Joe Klaas (The Twelve Steps to Happiness: A Practical Handbook for Understanding and Working the Twelve Step Programs for Alcoholism, Codependency, Eating Disorders, and Other Addictions)
β
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
β
β
Mahatma Gandhi
β
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
β
β
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
β
There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
β
β
John Lennon
β
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
β
β
Dalai Lama XIV
β
I would always rather be happy than dignified.
β
β
Charlotte BrontΓ« (Jane Eyre)
β
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
β
β
J.R.R. Tolkien
β
Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor.
β
β
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
β
Attitude is a choice. Happiness is a choice. Optimism is a choice. Kindness is a choice. Giving is a choice. Respect is a choice. Whatever choice you make makes you. Choose wisely.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
β
β
Tom Bodett
β
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
β
β
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
β
Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
β
β
Anne Frank
β
She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And thatβs importantβyou know
β
β
Marilyn Monroe
β
The Seven Social Sins are:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.
β
β
Frederick Lewis Donaldson
β
Take responsibility of your own happiness, never put it in other peopleβs hands.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfectβyou aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can breakβher heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
The most important thing is to enjoy your lifeβto be happyβit's all that matters.
β
β
Audrey Hepburn
β
The Paradoxical Commandments
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
β
β
Kent M. Keith (The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council)
β
Happiness is a warm puppy.
β
β
Charles M. Schulz
β
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
β
β
Jonathan Safran Foer
β
Donβt waste your time in anger, regrets, worries, and grudges. Life is too short to be unhappy.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett
β
It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.
β
β
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends & Influence People)
β
With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?
β
β
Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)
β
Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.
β
β
Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
β
No medicine cures what happiness cannot.
β
β
Gabriel GarcΓa MΓ‘rquez
β
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
β
β
George Burns
β
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
β
β
Marcel Proust
β
If you want to be happy, do not dwell in the past, do not worry about the future, focus on living fully in the present.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down βhappyβ. They told me I didnβt understand the assignment, and I told them they didnβt understand life.
β
β
John Lennon
β
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of sceneryβair, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
β
β
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
β
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
β
β
Oscar Wilde
β
If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her---then don't let her go.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)
β
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
β
β
Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)
β
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
β
There are no happy endings.
Endings are the saddest part,
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.
β
β
Shel Silverstein (Every Thing on It)
β
There is no real ending. Itβs just the place where you stop the story.
β
β
Frank Herbert
β
Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...
β
β
Alfred Tennyson
β
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
β
β
Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness)
β
Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals.
If you arenβt grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
β
β
Mark Twain
β
You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".
β
β
Lauren Oliver (Delirium (Delirium, #1))
β
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
β
β
Pearl S. Buck
β
Top 15 Things Money Canβt Buy
Time. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
β
β
Clive Barker (Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War)
β
But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
β
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
β
β
Ralph Waldo Emerson
β
Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.
β
β
Steve Maraboli
β
Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who donβt respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.
β
β
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1))
β
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?
β
β
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
β
Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get
β
β
W.P. Kinsella
β
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
β
β
Franz Kafka
β
Happiness [is] only real when shared
β
β
Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)
β
Heβs not perfect. You arenβt either, and the two of you will never be perfect. But if he can make you laugh at least once, causes you to think twice, and if he admits to being human and making mistakes, hold onto him and give him the most you can. He isnβt going to quote poetry, heβs not thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break. Donβt hurt him, donβt change him, and donβt expect for more than he can give. Donβt analyze. Smile when he makes you happy, yell when he makes you mad, and miss him when heβs not there. Love hard when there is love to be had. Because perfect guys donβt exist, but thereβs always one guy that is perfect for you.
β
β
Bob Marley
β
Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.
β
β
Clare Boothe Luce
β
Always find opportunities to make someone smile, and to offer random acts of kindness in everyday life.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett (The Light in the Heart)
β
I've got nothing to do today but smile.
β
β
Paul Simon
β
It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
β
β
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
β
The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.
β
β
Bette Midler
β
Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3))
β
A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.
β
β
Paulo Coelho
β
I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.
β
β
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
β
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
β
β
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
β
Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.
β
β
Ayn Rand
β
God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
β
β
C.S. Lewis
β
Cry. Forgive. Learn. Move on. Let your tears water the seeds of your future happiness.
β
β
Steve Maraboli
β
Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
β
β
Orhan Pamuk (Snow)
β
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, thereβs something stronger β something better, pushing right back.
β
β
Albert Camus
β
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness.
β
β
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
β
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
β
β
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (A Man Without a Country)
β
I'll just have them change the entry in the demonology textbook from 'almost extinct' to 'not extinct enough for Alec. He prefers his monsters really, really extinct.' Will that make you happy?
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2))
β
Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more.
β
β
Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)
β
He was my mum and dad's best friend. He's a convicted murderer, but he's broken out of wizard prison and he's on the run. He likes to keep in touch with me, though...keep up with my news...check if I'm happy...
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3))
β
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.
β
β
Alexandre Dumas
β
The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.
β
β
Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)
β
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Don't let the expectations and opinions of other people affect your decisions. It's your life, not theirs. Do what matters most to you; do what makes you feel alive and happy. Don't let the expectations and ideas of others limit who you are. If you let others tell you who you are, you are living their reality β not yours. There is more to life than pleasing people. There is much more to life than following others' prescribed path. There is so much more to life than what you experience right now. You need to decide who you are for yourself. Become a whole being. Adventure.
β
β
Roy T. Bennett
β
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, andβin spite of True Romance magazinesβwe shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonelyβat least, not all the timeβbut essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)
β
Promise Yourself
To be so strong that nothing
can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness, and prosperity
to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel
that there is something in them
To look at the sunny side of everything
and make your optimism come true.
To think only the best, to work only for the best,
and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others
as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past
and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times
and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself
that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear,
and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world,
not in loud words but great deeds.
To live in faith that the whole world is on your side
so long as you are true to the best that is in you.
β
β
Christian D. Larson (Your Forces and How to Use Them)
β
And I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean. I think it would be great to have written one of those songs. I bet if I wrote one of them, I would be very proud. I hope the people who wrote those songs are happy. I hope they feel it's enough. I really do because they've made me happy. And I'm only one person.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
β
β
Franz Kafka
β
Name one hero who was happy."
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
"I feel like I could eat the world raw.
β
β
Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
β
Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
β
β
Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
β
Clary,
Despite everything, I can't bear the thought of this ring being lost forever, any more then I can bear the thought of leaving you forever. And though I have no choice about the one, at least I can choose about the other. I'm leaving you our family ring because you have as much right to it as I do.
I'm writing this watching the sun come up. You're asleep, dreams moving behind your restless eyelids. I wish I knew what you were thinking. I wish I could slip into your head and see the world the way you do. I wish I could see myself the way you do. But maybe I dont want to see that. Maybe it would make me feel even more than I already do that I'm perpetuating some kind of Great Lie on you, and I couldn't stand that.
I belong to you. You could do anything you wanted with me and I would let you. You could ask anything of me and I'd break myself trying to make you happy. My heart tells me this is the best and greatest feeling I have ever had. But my mind knows the difference between wanting what you can't have and wanting what you shouldn't want. And I shouldn't want you.
All night I've watched you sleeping, watched the moonlight come and go, casting its shadows across your face in black and white. I've never seen anything more beautiful. I think of the life we could have had if things were different, a life where this night is not a singular event, separate from everything else that's real, but every night. But things aren't different, and I can't look at you without feeling like I've tricked you into loving me.
The truth no one is willing to say out loud is that no one has a shot against Valentine but me. I can get close to him like no one else can. I can pretend I want to join him and he'll believe me, up until that last moment where I end it all, one way or another. I have something of Sebastian's; I can track him to where my father's hiding, and that's what I'm going to do. So I lied to you last night. I said I just wanted one night with you. But I want every night with you. And that's why I have to slip out of your window now, like a coward. Because if I had to tell you this to your face, I couldn't make myself go.
I don't blame you if you hate me, I wish you would. As long as I can still dream, I will dream of you.
_Jace
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
β
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
β
β
Hermann Hesse (BΓ€ume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte)