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77 quotes that mention happiness in so many words. Each one is checked against the book it comes from.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and dull with regard to externals.
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life.
To fill the hour,—that is happiness
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose.
If we never flattered ourselves we should have but scant pleasure.
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.
In the theatre the pleasure of what we see and hear restrains our reflections.
Even in the moments of highest happiness and deepest misery we need the Artist.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one! keep from telling their happinesses to the unhappy.
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps.
Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
Prayers plough not; praises reap not; joys laugh not; sorrows weep not.
ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.
BAPTISM, n. A sacred rite of such efficacy that he who finds himself in heaven without having undergone it will be unhappy forever. It is performed with water in two ways—by immersion, or plunging, and by aspersion, or sprinkling.
DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.
ELYSIUM, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians—may their souls be happy in Heaven!
EPICURE, n. An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification from the senses.
EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled.
FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
INTERREGNUM, n. The period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne. The experiment of letting the spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again.
MANES, n. The immortal parts of dead Greeks and Romans. They were in a state of dull discomfort until the bodies from which they had exhaled were buried and burned; and they seem not to have been particularly happy afterward.
PLEASURE, n. The least hateful form of dejection.
QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.
The moderation of those who are happy arises from the calm which good fortune bestows upon their temper.
Jealousy is in a manner just and reasonable, as it tends to preserve a good which belongs, or which we believe belongs to us, on the other hand envy is a fury which cannot endure the happiness of others.
If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
It would seem that nature, which has so wisely ordered the organs of our body for our happiness, has also given us pride to spare us the mortification of knowing our imperfections.
Strength and weakness of mind are mis-named; they are really only the good or happy arrangement of our bodily organs.
Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.
Those who think they have merit persuade themselves that they are honoured by being unhappy, in order to persuade others and themselves that they are worthy to be the butt of fortune.
The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less upon their dispositions than their fortunes.
We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.
To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.
Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.
We are inconsolable at being deceived by our enemies and betrayed by our friends, yet still we are often content to be thus served by ourselves.
He who thinks he has the power to content the world greatly deceives himself, but he who thinks that the world cannot be content with him deceives himself yet more.
The pleasure of love is in loving, we are happier in the passion we feel than in that we inspire.
Almost all the world takes pleasure in paying small debts; many people show gratitude for trifling, but there is hardly one who does not show ingratitude for great favours.
The extreme delight we take in talking of ourselves should warn us that it is not shared by those who listen.
It is more difficult to be faithful to a mistress when one is happy, than when we are ill-treated by her.
It is equally as difficult to be contented when one has too much or too little love.
We are often less unhappy at being deceived by one we loved, than on being deceived.
In the old age of love as in life we still survive for the evils, though no longer for the pleasures.
As in friendship so in love, we are often happier from ignorance than from knowledge.
Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth.
The danger in HAPPINESS.—“Everything now turns out best for me, I now love every fate:—who would like to be my fate?”
I keep silence about many things, for I do not want to put people out of countenance; and I am well content if they are pleased with things that annoy me.
Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth. The growing child is wise in this sense.
Nature asks that a man should sometimes be stupefied without going to sleep; hence the pleasure in the smoking of tobacco, the drinking of brandy, the use of opiates.
There are problematical natures which are equal to no position in which they find themselves, and which no position satisfies. This it is that causes that hideous conflict which wastes life and deprives it of all pleasure.
He is the happiest man who can set the end of his life in connection with the beginning.
Why should those who are happy expect one who is miserable to die before them in a graceful attitude, like the gladiator before the Roman mob?
Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them.
We are all so limited that we always think we are right; and so we may conceive of an extraordinary mind which not only errs but has a positive delight in error.
People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but mischief, and delight in it.
Every one suffers who does not work for himself. A man works for others to have them share in his joy.
It is no wonder that we all more or less delight in the mediocre, because it leaves us in peace: it gives us the comfortable feeling of intercourse with what is like ourselves.
In the presence of Nature even moderate talent is always possessed of insight; hence drawings from Nature that are at all carefully done always give pleasure.
Kant taught us the critique of the reason. We must have a critique of the senses if Art in general, and especially German Art, is ever to regain its tone and move forward on the path of life and happiness.