c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The process of discovering your fearless self is of refinement, not adding. The best way to reconnect with your freedom is to look at the rules you have that govern your freedom.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
There is no happily-ever-after to run to. We have to work for happiness.
— Mary Balogh, Simply Magic
It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a huge research staff to study the problem.
— Bill Vaughan
It’s true that laughter really is cheap medicine. It’s a prescription anyone can afford. And best of all, you can fill it right now.
— Steve Goodier
Whoever said happiness needs a plan?
— Robert Holden
The greenest of pastures are right here on earth.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Happy are those who evolve from within.
— Amit Abraham
These fucking women really piss me off,' April said. 'Because instead of being elated by the thought of making their own happiness and chasing some crazy dream, all they want to do is narrow their options and do something safe.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Commencement
Happiness isn't always easy," he'd said. "But it's a priority.
— Goldy Moldavsky, Kill the Boy Band
It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.
— Francesca Lia Block, Blood Roses
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.
— Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction
Stop trying to 'fix' yourself
—  you're NOT broken! You are perfectly imperfect and powerful beyond measure.
He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of ringlets must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting there); he took a strand of it and wound it around his finger. With his other hand he began stroking my face, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes - and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission.
— Kerstin Gier, Ruby Red
I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...
— C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
How would your life be different if...You decided to give freely, love fully, and play feverously? Let today be the day...You free yourself from the conditioned rules that limit your happiness and dilute the beautiful life experience. Have fun. Give - Love - Play!
— Steve Maraboli, The Power of One
Sometimes you just have to jump in a mud puddle because it's there. Never get so old that you forget about having fun.
— Tom Giaquinto, Be A Good Human
Everything is easier said than done. Wanting something is easy. Saying something is easy. The challenge and the reward are in the doing.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
You would not want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness, so please do not hold someone else responsible for yours!
— Jennifer O'Neill, Inspirational Quotes
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.
— Honoré de Balzac
When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.
— Dorothy Day
To answer your question as honestly as I can, I've wanted since I was very little to not have to worry about money. I've never been poverty-level poor (I mean, there's been years where I've been officially beneath the poverty line, but that wasn't poverty: that was being a student and living the Student Lifestyle), but I've been in a place where you know you can't afford a better-quality food, where you can't do certain things because of money, and I'd prefer not to have those problems if I can. I sort of have troubles with money in general, with how it determines so much of our lives but with how we all try to ignore it, but I would like to be (and stay) in a place where I can pick up some new comics and games and not worry about how much they cost.This is terrible; you're asking me where I want to be in the future, what I want my life to be like, and the only thing I can tell you is "Man, all I know is I don't want to be POOR.
— Ryan North
Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.
— Geneen Roth
The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
— Daniel C. Dennett
A truly radical resolution would be to embrace existence just as it is, as the only thing that matters, to proclaim that the world itself is heaven, made for our total enjoyment and fulfillment...
— CrimethInc., Expect Resistance: A Field Manual
Man does not strive for happiness
—  only the Englishman does that.
The notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modern, uniquely American, uniquely destructive idea.
— Andrew Weil, M.D.
To fill the hour──that is happiness.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tatsuya: What you have "right now" won't necessarily continue on until forever...Hiro: ... Yeah, I know.
— Ibuki Haneda, Koizora (Love Sky), Volume 1
God bless Dunkin' Donuts.
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
It is better to dwell on the beautiful things in life than the negative.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty weapon." ( Kym Douglas / Cindy Pearlman, 2006)
— Susan Sarandon
We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.
— John Fowles
Le bonheur est cette danse où l'on s'approche et l'on s'écarte sans se perdre. Il est même fait des larmes des longues séparations à condition que viennent les retrouvailles.
— Timothée de Fombelle, Le Livre de Perle
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You need to figure out what you want, Josh. If that means you need to swim against the tide to get it, at least youre aiming for something that could make you very happy.
— Jay Asher, The Future of Us
A week feels like a year when you’re seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched melodiously under our feet as we danced onward through the night.
— Chloe Rattray, Sacré Noir
People will always notice something about you. It might be the way you walk or the way you talk, or just simply your personality. Live each day in the way you want to be remembered. Live in such a way that people will be inspired by those unique qualities that you have and strive to live better lives for themselves.
— Amaka Imani Nkosazana
The quickest way to experiencing the peace inside, is to learn to recognize when I am not at peace.
— James Patrick McDonald
I've always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is fining the right corner.
— Eric    Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.
— Claire Holden Rothman, The Heart Specialist
If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fuckin' up
— Ani DiFranco
I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances.
— Andrew Weil, M.D.
Challenges in life can either enrich you or poison you. You are the one who decides.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me?As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has.
— Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke
You are the point of origin for everything in your world: you set the standard for yourself.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
We need more than just the Law of Attraction. We need to connect with its more successful twin, the Law of Generosity. And further entwine ourselves with their parent; the Law of Love.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase
—  if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.
— Kij Johnson, The Fox Woman
Blaming is so much easier than taking responsibility, because if you take responsibility … then you might be to blame.
— Jennifer O'Neill, The Pursuit of Happiness: 21 Spiritual Rules to Sucess
She couldn't avoid being serious about things she cared for, and happiness made her grave at the thought of all the things which might destroy it.
— Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale
Sadness is never bad," said Amparo. "Sadness is the mirror of being happy
— Tim Willocks, The Religion
If one were to build the house of happiness, the largest space would be the waiting room.
— Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard
The best way to insure you achieve the greatest satisfaction out of life is to behave intentionally.
— Deborah Day, BE HAPPY NOW!
You would not be here TODAY if YESTERDAY was your defining moment. LIVE THIS DAY and move towards your dreams.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Don't show a friend your gift, or your bag of money if you still want to maintain your relationship, but if nay, go on, and all you'll see is hate and jealousy, and you'll fight with him in the street like a dog and all you'll feel is regret.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invicible host against difficulties.
— Helen Keller
His hand lay across my stomach as he slept soundly. I entwined my fingers with his and breathed through the warmth that seeped through my chest. Such a simple, sweet thing to do, yet holding hands in bed was incredibly intimate.
— N.R. Walker, Spencer Cohen, Book Three
The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Do you want to retire early rich or retire late poor? Cosmic Ordering answers the first question!
— Stephen Richards, Cosmic Ordering Connection: Change your life within minutes!
Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.
— Luther Burbank
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
— Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn't tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon in late September, and because of that I felt a kind of loneliness new to me, as if I were the only one here who was not truly part of the scene.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Dear me! how happy and good we'd be, if we had no worries!
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.
— Meryl Streep
There is nothing around me but money, money, money.
— Stephen Richards
Suffering sucks. Don't do it. Go home and love your wife. Go home and love yourself. Go homeand base your happiness on one thing and one thing only: freedom. Choose freedom, not suffering. Create a life of freedom, not wanting. Have some really good coffee and listen to the red-winged blackbirds in the marsh. Ignore the mosquitoes.
— Laura Munson, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness
HappinessThere's just no accounting for happiness,or the way it turns up like a prodigalwho comes back to the dust at your feethaving squandered a fortune far away.And how can you not forgive?You make a feast in honor of whatwas lost, and take from its place the finestgarment, which you saved for an occasionyou could not imagine, and you weep night and dayto know that you were not abandoned,that happiness saved its most extreme formfor you alone.No, happiness is the uncle you neverknew about, who flies a single-engine planeonto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikesinto town, and inquires at every dooruntil he finds you asleep midafternoonas you so often are during the unmercifulhours of your despair.It comes to the monk in his cell.It comes to the woman sweeping the streetwith a birch broom, to the childwhose mother has passed out from drink.It comes to the lover, to the dog chewinga sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,and to the clerk stacking cans of carrotsin the night.It even comes to the boulderin the perpetual shade of pine barrens,to rain falling on the open sea,to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
— Jane Kenyon
It's about the quality of the worry," I said. "I have happier worries now than I used to.
— David Gilmour, The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son
(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me."And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy."...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. 
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Money can't buy happiness but it can buy a huge yacht that sails right next to it.
— David Lee Roth
It is more important to be free than to be happy.
— Tom Robbins
Unhappiness can be like a virus spreading from one person, to the next person, to the next one and so on. When someone is mean or rude to you, do not let their unhappiness infect your own life. If you are the unhappy one, please quarantine yourself so you do not infect others!
— Jennifer O'Neill, Soul DNA: Your Spiritual Genetic Code Defines Your Purpose
We thought everything would be forgotten, but I still remember yourclaws running down my back.I wonder if you still think about us,the way I do.How our legs would crash into each other in the middle of the night, and how we endedup creating the moon in the confines of our beds.
— Zaeema J. Hussain, The Sky Is Purple
But I am king. And the well-being of my kingdom depends on my sound judgment and clear head. And those things depend on my state of happiness. And I have known for a long time that my state of happiness depends on you.
— Sharon Shinn, Summers at Castle Auburn
Happiness is not in things
—  happiness is in you.
The really happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery, even when they have to take a detour.
— James Hopwood Jeans
Imagination doesn't always make you long for what you cannot have, but rather thrive in what you do not have.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
True happiness is when the love that is within us finds expression in external activities.
— Mata Amritanandamayi
To be happy, you have to risk being unhappy.
— Ogwo David Emenike, Happiness Recipe: Eat and Stay Happy
Be happy. It's one way of being wise
— Colette
If one’s life is so unsatisfying that an unhealthy activity brings a shred of happiness, it is nigh impossible to give it up unless something that brings greater happiness can be enjoyed in its stead. (28)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others--the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.
— George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
Smartass Disciple: Master, what is the secret recipe of your happiness?Master of Stupidity: If I tell you, there is nobody left to be made fun of.
— Toba Beta
(the whole world is at thethroat of the world,everybody feels angry,short-changed, cheated,everybody is despondent,disillusioned.)I welcomed shots of peace, tattered shards ofhappiness.
— Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won’t find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99)
— Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happened. Each time the goal is reached, it becomes Not So Much Fun, and we're off to reach the next one, then the next one, then the next.That doesn't mean that the goals we have don't count. They do, mostly because they cause us to go through the process and it's the process that makes us wise, happy, or whatever. If we do things in the wrong sort of way, it makes us miserable, angry, confused, and things like that. The goal has to be right for us, and it has to be beneficial, in order to ensure a beneficial process. But aside from that, it's really the process that's important.
— Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh
Take one cup of love, two cups of loyalty, three cups of forgiveness, four quarts of faith and one barrel of laughter. Take love and loyalty and mix them thoroughly with faith; blend with tenderness, kindness and understanding. Add friendship and hope. Sprinkle abundantly with laughter. Bake it with sunshine. Wrap it regularly with lots of hugs. Serve generous helpings daily.
— Zig Ziglar
Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who have tried for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.
— Victor Hugo
Live in this moment ... for it is the only moment we have!
— Stephen Richards
It's impossible to be unhappy while wearing a poncho!
— Noel Fielding
Three weeks ago, he’d seen hail fall from the sky, onlyto be followed minutes later by a spectacular rainbow that seemed to frame the azalea bushes. The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it’s important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Choice
Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
— Primo Levi
To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
— John Dewey
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
The bitterness of joy lies in the knowledge that it cannot last. Nor should joy last beyond a certain season, for, after that season, even joy would become merely habit.
— Tanith Lee, Delusion's Master
When true happiness shows up, the ego is bored with it: It's too plain, too ordinary, and it doesn't leave us feeling special or above the fray. It doesn't take away our problems, which is the ego's idea of happiness. The ego wants no more difficulties: no ore sickness, no more need for money, no more work, no more bad feelings, only unending pleasure and bliss. Such perfection is the ego's idea of a successful life. However, the happiness the ego dreams of will never be attained by anyone. The ego denies the reality of this dimension, where challenges are necessary to evolution and blissful states and pleasure come and go.
— Gina Lake, What about Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment
I drink to the general joy o’ the whole table." Macbeth
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
It's not strength, it's PERCEPTION that makes you stronger. If you change how you SEE it, you'll change how you FEEL about it.
— Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried:  A Memoir
Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing up against your legs and jumping into your lap.
— William J. Bennett
You must never forget that greatness does not guarantee happiness but goodness always does
— Sri Chinmoy
Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.
— Wayne Coyne
An empty bus hurtles through the starry nightPerhaps the driver is singingand happy because he sings.
— Günter Grass
The average human being is actually quite bad at predicting what he or she should do in order to be happier, and this inability to predict keeps people from, well, being happier. In fact, psychologist Daniel Gilbert has made a career out of demonstrating that human beings are downright awful at predicting their own likes and dislikes. For example, most research subjects strongly believe that another $30,000 a year in income would make them much happier. And they feel equally strongly that adding a 30-minute walk to their daily routine would be of trivial import. And yet Dr. Gilbert’s research suggests that the added income is far less likely to produce an increase in happiness than the addition of a regular walk.
— Kerry Patterson, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
The only means by which one could attain complete happiness is to avoid living in constant expectation of it. It's the expectation that causes our unhappiness and consequent bitterness about life
— Mohammed Naseehu Ali, The Prophet of Zongo Street: Stories
The problem with people is they forget that most of the time it's the small things that count. Everyone's so busy waiting in the Waiting Place. If we stopped to remember that there's such a thing as a Purina Tower and a view like this, we'd all be happier.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man.
— Neel Burton, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
Like love, like talent, like any other virtue, like anything else in this life, happiness needs to be nurtured - this is the truth of the whole matter.
— Ogwo David Emenike, Happiness Recipe: Eat and Stay Happy
Happiness when sustained too long in print can rightly be construed as sappiness...
— Millard Kaufman, Bowl of Cherries
If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life—I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever.
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats
Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.
— Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
Our way of thinking creates good or bad outcomes.
— Stephen Richards
The more I understand the mind and the human experience, the more I begin to suspect there is no such thing as unhappiness; there is only ungratefulness.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
— Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
We are often insane with happiness. We are also very unhappy for reasons neither of us can do anything about. Like being separated.
— Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
The universe doesn't give you what you want in your mind
—  it gives you what you demand with your actions.
Happiness is a nothingness without completeness.
— Hlovate, Contengan Jalanan
There are very few things in the mind which eat up as much energy as worry. It is one of the most difficult things not to worry about anything. Worry is experienced when things go wrong, but in relation to past happenings it is idle merely to wish that they might have been otherwise. The frozen past is what it is, and no amount of worrying is going to make it other than what it has been. But the limited ego-mind identifies itself with its past, gets entangled with it and keeps alive the pangs of frustrated desires. Thus worry continues to grow into the mental life of man until the ego-mind is burdened by the past. Worry is also experienced in relation to the future when this future is expected to be disagreeable in some way. In this case it seeks to justify itself as a necessary part of the attempt to prepare for coping with the anticipated situations. But, things can never be helped merely by worrying. Besides, many of the things which are anticipated never turn up, or if they do occur, they turn out to be much more acceptable than they were expected to be. Worry is the product of feverish imagination working under the stimulus of desires. It is a living through of sufferings which are mostly our own creation. Worry has never done anyone any good, and it is very much worse than mere dissipation of psychic energy, for it substantially curtails the joy and fullness of life.
— Meher Baba, Discourses
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
— Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
— Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
It makes no difference where you go, there you are. And it makes no difference what you have, there’s always more to want. Until you are happy with who you are, you will never be happy because of what you have.
— Zig Ziglar
.. she believed a great happiness awaited her somewhere, and for this reason she remained calm as the days flew by.
— Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower
Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.
— John Irving, Last Night in Twisted River
Unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories.
— Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder
These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.
— Wilfred Owen, The Poems Of Wilfred Owen
Sex could be a blissful communion,. But it could also be a weapon, and its absence, sometimes, was required for the establishment of peace.
— Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Happiness is simple. Everything we do to find it is complicated.
— Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
And although it might be best of all to be Socrates satisfied, having both happiness and depth, we would give up some happiness in order to gain the depth.
— Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations
I am in an altogether new world now. I can think of nothing more wonderful. It is a real touch of all that heaven means.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
I hate going through this when we just found...," his voice trailed off."Found what?""Each other," he finished, half-smiling.
— Markelle Grabo, The Elf Girl
Oh, Marilla, I thought I was happy before. Now I know that I just dreamed a pleasant dream of happiness. This is the reality.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams
If there was one thing that life has taught me, it’s to accept the most foolish and unthinkable happiness.
— Anne-Laure Bondoux, The Killer's Tears
The midsummer sun shines but dim, The fields strive in vain to look gay; But when I am happy in Him December's as pleasant as May.
— John Newton
-Paint-My girlfriend is so besotted that she can't take her eyes off me. After we've turned out the light she puts on her night-vision goggles, and watched me as I sleep. Quite often I am woken by her sighing and involuntary yelps of happiness. This has been going on for years, and is showing no sign of abating. Once I asked her to stop all this infra-red activity, but it didn't really work; I'd wake up to find her covering me in luminous paint, and softly whispering, 'Sometimes I wonder if you know how much I love you.
— Dan Rhodes, Anthropology
Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom
— Gustave Flaubert, November
One should cultivate good habits of memory, for it is capable of making existence a Paradise or an Inferno.
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
i have laughedmore than daffodilsand cried more than June.
— Sanober  Khan
There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time).
— Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy
If you see the world and yourself through a lens smudged by negativity then you’ll find much misery. If you look outwards and inwards through lens brightened by positivity you’ll find much to be happy and appreciative about.
— Henrik Edberg, The 7 Timeless Habits of Happiness
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy...to wit--the wag of a dog's tail.
— Josh Billings
Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
— Mary Baker Eddy
Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
Straight lines go too quickly to appreciate the pleasures of the journey. They rush straight to their target and then die in the very moment of their triumph without having thought, loved, suffered or enjoyed themselves. Broken lines do not know what they want. With their caprices they cut time up, abuse routes, slash the joyous flowers and split the peaceful fruits with their corners. It is another story with curved lines. The song of the curved line is called happiness.
— René Crevel
He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.'I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?''Inside.'It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.
— Jerry Spinelli, Milkweed
Culture is an elevated expression of the inner voice which the different peoples of the Earth have heard in the depths of their being, a voice which conveys the vibrant compassion and wisdom of the cosmic life. For different cultures to engage in interaction is to catalyze each other's souls and foster mutual understanding.
— Daisaku Ikeda
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early  spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
Mother earth cried so much that she has pool of tears more than the land of happiness.
— Santosh Kalwar
I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
if you feel happy, Smile with all your heart. if you're down, smile with all your might.
— Paul Ian Guillermo
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
She was like the sun, She knew her place in the world - She would shine again regardless of all the storms and changeable weather She wouldn't adjust her purpose for things that pass.
— Nikki Rowe
When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).
— Ariel Gore, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness
It was not in me It came and wentI wanted to hold it It was held by wine(I no longer know what it was)
— Rainer Maria Rilke
A lifetime of lonely regret or happiness with some pain along the way.
— Melissa Nathan, Persuading Annie
If you’re not happy, then something is wrong. A person comes into the world as a happy being, yet over time, the happiness fades away and they find themselves in this bubble of anxiety and misery all the time. And it’s a comfortable place to stay, so they end up hanging out in this bubble for years and years before it suddenly dawns on them that life is meant to be happy. And, it is. It’s just that they’re too busy getting caught up in worry and stress to notice that life is magnificent and beautiful. Being alive is good. Being alive should already make you happy.
— Leigh Hershkovich
Nothing in the world can make you happy
—  everything in the world can encourage you to be happy
So he caught her in his arms and kissed her, and they were very happy, and told each other what a beautiful world it was, and how wonderful it was that they should have found each other, seeing that the world is not only beautiful but rather large.
— E. Nesbit, The Magic World
Happiness earned, not given.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
When life gives you pain, accept it. When life gives you happiness, reject it.
— Santosh Kalwar
He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
In order to have great happiness, you have to have great pain and unhappiness-otherwise how would you know when you're happy?
— Leslie Caron
Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow. Plant misery seeds and that us what you reap.
— Stephen Richards, Think Your way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free
Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.
— Daniel Kahneman, Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Don't wait for other people to be loving, giving, compassionate, grateful, forgiving, generous, or friendly... lead the way!
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Stop waiting for the perfect day or the perfect moment... Take THIS day, THIS moment and lead it to perfection.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
— Mark Nepo
They think I’m simpleminded because I seem to be happy. Why shouldn’t I be happy? I have everything I ever wanted and more. Maybe I am simpleminded. Maybe that’s the key: simple.
— Dolly Parton, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business
Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Dream your dream; and realize that you are more than just the dreamer, you are the point of origin for its reality.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Happiness comes in many forms — in the company of good friends, in the feeling you get when you make someone else’s dream come true, or in the promise of hope renewed. It’s okay to let yourself be happy because you never know how fleeting that happiness might be.
— Lucas Scott
She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.
— Jane Austen, Emma
You will realize one day that all the money in the world cannot buy you happiness. Nor can it make you a person of good character. 
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
The only way I can be angry at you is when I have thought, said, or done something that is unkind in my own opinion.
— Byron Katie
He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
— Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
This idea of perpetual happiness is crazy and overrated, because those dark moments fuel you for the next bright moments; each one helps you appreciate the other.
— Brad Pitt
Frugality, I've learned, has its own cost, one that sometimes lasts forever.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding
I wonder if people always choose what will make them unhappy.
— Megan Whalen Turner, A Conspiracy of Kings
So what's the point, then, if we can't be happy? Why are we doing any of this?""Oh, there's definitely happiness," Jack said, turning his back on the ocean and looking at her. "But it's just about moments, not ever-afters." He grinned. "Like when you're right in the middle of the ocean with your friends, with no one trying to kill you in any kind of horrifying way. You have to appreciate these moments when they happen, 'cause obviously we don't get many of them.
— James Riley, The Half Upon a Time Trilogy: Half Upon a Time; Twice Upon a Time; Once Upon the End
Happiness,... even the smallest happiness, is like a step out of Time, and the greatest happiness is sharing in Eternity.
— Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation
Happiness isn’t the reward we retrieve after a long struggle. It arrives daily, in those clear moments when our hearts are tender, pricked by the embrace of a loved one, the beauty of a single flower, the majesty of the world in which we are central. Look over your shoulder at how far you’ve come and all the good things you’ve experienced and that is when you will see the smiling face of happiness.
— Toni Sorenson
There is no such thing as a perfectly happy or perfectly unhappy man in the world. One has more happiness in his life and another more unhappiness, and the same circumstance may produce widely different effects on individuals of different temperaments.
— Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life
It is in the balancing of your spirituality with your humanity that you will find immeasurable happiness, success, good health, and love.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
I know money isn't everything. but it certainly is something.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi, COLOMBO STREETS
Sometimes I think if we didn’t have these problems the whole world would stop spinning on her axis, we’d all stop spinning on our axises, axes, or whatever you want to call them, and then we’d have to settle into the nasty business of finding a way to be happy.
— Daniel Clausen, Ghosts of Nagasaki: Silence
I used to float along in all of this, like a leaf on a coursing stream, but i am heavier now, less easily moved, more resolute and steadfast. I am no longer in pursuit of happiness. As I stand here at my front door, key in hand, I think it is just possible that happiness, at least for now, today, this hour, may be in pursuit of me.
— Anne Giardini, The Sad Truth About Happiness
If you love a person, you should show it in adundance, not reserve it for special occasions like fine china.
— Bryan Cohen, The Post-College Guide to Happiness
The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects
I wished upon a star and the heavens sent me you
— Sonya Watson, The Tide Breaker
Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
Comparison is the thief of joy.
— Theodore Roosevelt
I don't know whether it is beautiful or sad, that I find such blissful happiness within the confines of my own mind, more so than I do in the reality that surrounds me.
— Kendal Rob
Human happiness is defined by the hardships and conflicts you have been through. The greater they are, the greater is your happiness.
— Petar Dunov
The good news is that I believe every woman who wants to can find a great partner. You're just going to need to get rid of the idea that marriage will make you happy. It won't. Once the initial high wears off, you'll just be you, except with twice as much laundry. Because ultimately, marriage is not about getting something -- it's about giving it. Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession -- a free-agent penis -- and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland.
— Tracy McMillan
[Poem: Slates of Grey]Sullen faces like slates of grey—What I’d seen on a walk today.Bodies rushing bodies boltingTime for life a disregarding.Money to make and to grow oldWhat about the hands to hold?Deadlines, projects, people to meetWhat about our own two feet.Sullen faces like slates of grey...What I’d see most anyday.
— Jess C. Scott, Trouble