Quotings on Happiness

Happiness is inside oneself.

Hewctor Boece (1465-1536)

There’s only one way to achieve happiness: you need to stop tormenting yourself about the things over which our will has no influence.

Epictetus (1st century)

Happiness is knowing what you want and wanting it passionately.

Félicien Marceau

Happiness is the same, whether you find it through great fortune or a humble state.

Euripides (480-406 BC)

Not only were we happy but we knew it.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

People who rise from individuals to princes simply due to the favours of fortune have little trouble in succeeding but great trouble in staying there.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Mirth is like flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment: cheerfulness keeps up a kind of day-light in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Cheerfulness gives elasticity to the spirit. Spectres fly before it.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904)

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

John Stuart Mill (1806-73)

Why is it that many people are afraid to admit they are happy? .. If everything is going as well as could possibly be expected and you ask them how they are, they say, “Can’t complain.”

William Lyon Phelps

When a man is happy he does not hear the clock strike.

German proverb

When one is happy there is no time to be fatigued; being happy engrosses the whole attention.

Edward Frederic Benson (1862-1925)

Do not worry; eat three square meals a day; say your prayers; be courteous to your creditors; keep your digestion good; exercise, go slow and easy. Maybe there are other things your special case requires to make you happy, but my friend, these I reckon will give you a good lift.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)

True happiness, we are told, consists of getting out of one’s self, but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

Henry James (1843-1916)

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man’s hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.

Don Marquis (1878-1937)

Very few people can stand conditions of life that are too happy; the great majority become stultified by them. Life is only felt to be real when it is creatively active. Thus people who appear to outsiders to be exceptionally happy, because of their freedom from care, are as a rule the least satisfied.

Count Hermann Keyserling

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

Thomas Merton (1915-68)

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in person and things.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

There are many happy men who cannot bear to be alone with their happiness, for man has even more need of help in joy than in sorrow.

Georges Duhamel (1884-1966)

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Teach us to delight in simple things,

And mirth that has no bitter springs

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Edmund Burke (1729-97)

The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed.

Nicolas Chamfort (1741-94)

Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; conversely every lot is happy to one who is content with it.

Anicius Boethius (480-524)

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

Epictetus (1st century)

It often amuses me to hear men impute all their misfortunes to fate, luck or destiny, whilst their successes or good fortune they ascribe to their own sagacity, cleverness or penetration.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)