Happiness Quotes and Proverbs

Democritus, (460?-370? BC)
Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold, the feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.

Aristotle
To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

Sharon Salzberg
It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.

John Templeton
Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth... Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it. .

Ursula K. LeGuin
I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy.

Mary Baker Eddy
Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.

Unknown
Take care of yourself. Good health is everyone's major source of wealth. Without it, happiness is almost impossible.

Martha Washington
The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.

Unknown
Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have.

Lord Byron
All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.

Anon
Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.

Alice Meynell
Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

Unknown
The really happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery when on a detour.

Diogenes Laertius, Zeno
One ought to seek out virtue for its own sake, without being influenced by fear or hope, or by any external influence. Moreover, that in that does happiness consist.

Victor Hugo
The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Picasso
Everything exists in limited quantity - especially happiness.

Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

Margaret Lee Runbeck
Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

John B. Sheerin
Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.

Anne Frank
Think of all the beauty thats still left in and around you and be happy!

Allan K. Chalmers
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to
hope for.

Anon
Happiness is enhanced by others but does not depend upon others.

Anon
Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.

Scottish Proverb
Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.

Robert Anthony
Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.

Jim Thomson
I can only think of one thing greater than being happy and that is to help another to be happy, too.

Aristotle
...happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it...

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.

Edith Wharton
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.

Buddha
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.

Allan K. Chalmers
The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Benjamin Disraeli
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

Anne Frank
We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

Aristotle, In Philosophy
Happiness is something final and complete in itself, as being the aim and end of all practical activities whatever .... Happiness then we define as the active exercise of the mind in conformity with perfect goodness or virtue.

Primo Levi
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

Aristotle
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.

Aristotle
Happiness depends upon ourselves.

St. Augustine
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

Albert Camus
You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.

Charles Caleb Colton
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.

Euripedes
Luckier than one's neighbor, but still not happy.

Fontenelle
A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.

Sigmund Freud
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

Thomas Fuller
No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy.

Samuel Johnson
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Mark Twain
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one—keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Charles Schulz
Happiness is a warm puppy.
 
Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso
When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.

Ben Franklin
The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Jane Austen
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation. Foolish preparation?

Roy M. Goodman
Remember that happiness is a way of travel — not a destination.

Cynthia Nelms
Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.

William Makepeace Thackeray
Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

Aristotle
Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.

Mark Twain
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

The Dalai Lama
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

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

Agnes Repplier
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

E. B. White
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

Johann von Goethe
He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

Burton Hills
Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.

Helen Keller
No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Jacques Prévert
Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

Publilius Syrus
The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.

Bertrand Russell
Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

Bertrand Russell
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

George Santayana
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Henry Miller
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.

William Blake
The essentials to happiness are something to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

Thomas Paine
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.