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Quotes about happiness

248 quotes from 159 people

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Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.
Elbert Hubbard1856–1915
- Work
To be happy, one only must be able to confront, which is to say, experience, those things that are. Unhappiness is only this: the inability to confront that which is.
L. Ron Hubbard1911–1986A New Slant on Life (1998).
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief!
Victor Hugo1802–1885Les Misérables (1862), page 746, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers
- Love
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Aldous Huxley1894–1963“Religion and Time” in C. Isherwood (ed.) Vedanta for the Western World (1945)
Whoever increases the sum of human joy, is a worshiper. He who adds to the sum of human misery, is a blasphemer.
Robert G. Ingersoll1833–1899The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
- Religion
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.
Robert G. Ingersoll1833–1899“The Gods” (1876) as published in The Gods and Other Lectures (1879)
- Science
We are trying always to be happy, but unhappiness is just as real, just as important an emotion. And if you are closing yourself off from it, you are closing yourself off from other people.
Lily Jamesborn 1989Hodge, Gavanndra (15 June 2019). “Lily James: ‘We are trying always to be happy, but unhappiness is just as real, just as important’”
- Emotion
It makes a tremendous emotional and practical difference to one whether one accepts the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints.
William James1842–1910The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
- Religion
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784Letter (8 June 1762) [to an unnamed recipient], p. 103
- Hope
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II (21 March 1776) p. 287
Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784The Idler (1758–1760), No. 58 (26 May 1759)
True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.
Ben Jonson1572–1637Cynthia’s Revels (1600), Act III, scene ii
- Friendship
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.
James Joyce1882–1941A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter IVIn context
- Life & Death
The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy, as indeed of every philosophy, is happiness, but happiness that consists in living according to nature, and not according to the opinions of the multitude.
Julian331–363Oration to the Uneducated Cynics (tr. W. C. Wright, ii, 1913)
- Philosophy
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Carl Jung1875–1961“The Art of Living”, interview with journalist Gordon Young first published in 1960