"To see a world in a grain of sand
and heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour."
William Blake"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."
George Santayana"If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having."
Henry Miller"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
Maxim Gorky"Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts."
Chinese proverb"The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so."
William Ralph Inge"The happy man's without a shirt."
John Heywood"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
George Orwell"The secret of happiness is to face the world is horrible, horrible, horrible."
Bertrand Russell"It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while."
Don Marquis"The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
John Milton"It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy"
Immanuel Kant"The happy think a lifetime short, but to the unhappy one night can be an eternity."
Lucian"The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things."
Epictetus"Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve."
Robert S. Lynd"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
Ernest Hemingway"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."
Aristotle"Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it."
Alexandre Dumas"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."
Dostoevsky"Happiness depends, as Nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose."
William Cowper"Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are, who already possess it."
François Duc de La Rochefoucauld"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
Ernest Hemingway"I am happy and content because I think I am."
Alain-René Lesage"Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings"
Immanuel Kant"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."
Jeremy Bentham"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright"
Walter Benjamin"I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?"
George Gissing"I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen."
Abd-El-Raham"...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..."
Aristotle"Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't."
Aldous Huxley"If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day."
W. Beran Wolfe"Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things."
La Rochefoucauld"The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it."
Arthur Schopenhauer"Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant."
Mark Twain"Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself."
Plutarch"When a man has lost all happiness, he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."
Sophocles"Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible."
St AugustineTranquil pleasure constitutes human beings' supreme good
Epicurus"What is the worth of anything,
But for the happiness 'twill bring?"
Richard Owen Cambridge"Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's"
Bertrand Russell"By heaven we understand a state of happiness infinite in degree, and endless in duration."
Benjamin Franklin"Present joys are more to flesh and blood
Than a dull prospect of a distant good."
John Dryden"Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults."
Thomas Szasz"He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise."
Thomas Fuller"He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise."
William Blake"I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them."
John Stuart Mill."Be happy. It's one way of being wise."
Colette"The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable."
Goethe"Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks."
Samuel Johnson"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence becomes a mad lamentable experiment."
George Santayana"The more refined one is, the more unhappy."
Anton Chekhov"No pleasure is evil in itself; but the means by which certain pleasures are gained bring pains many times greater than the pleasures."
Epicurus"How to gain, how to keep, and how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive for all they do."
William James"Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys."
Christian Nestell Bovee"How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial, but how you will feel on average over the next ten years is fully 80 percent because of your genes."
Dean Hamer
