c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.
— Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.
— Lemony Snicket, The End
There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
— Stendhal, Love
Happy girls are the prettiest
— Audrey Hepburn
Success is getting what you want..Happiness is wanting what you get.
— Dale Carnegie
We all live with the objective of being happy
—  our lives are all different and yet the same.
those who do not know how to see the precious things in life will never be happy.
— Alex Flinn, Beastly
Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
— Joanne Harris, Chocolat
There you go...let it all slide out. Unhappiness can't stick in a person's soul when it's slick with tears.
— Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down.
— Stephen Richards, Cosmic Ordering: You can be successful
It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.
— Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls
Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one.
— Edmund Burke
Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.
— Dave Ramsey, The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections
— Bob Marley
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. 
— Epictetus
The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.
— Carlos Castañeda
Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.
— Dalai Lama XIV
Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running—that's the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters. And if your cans are redhot and you can't hold them in your hands, just use good old railroad gloves, that's all.
— Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.
— Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result 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.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...
— Susan Polis Schutz
Many people think excitement is happiness.... But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power
I am intrigued by the smile upon your face, and the sadness within your eyes
— Jeremy Aldana
It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. 
— Lucille Ball
Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.
— Stephen Fry
Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
Memory is the happiness of being alone.
— Lois Lowry, Anastasia Krupnik
My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
Is anyone anywhere happy?
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Happiness doesn't result from what we get, but from what we give.
— Ben Carson
When you connect to the silence within you, that is when you can make sense of the disturbance going on around you.
— Stephen Richards
Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion - prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me'. Then he wonders why he's unhappy.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
It is a happiness to wonder
—  -- it is a happiness to dream.
The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world...Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
— Andy Rooney
I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy.
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.
— Dorothy Parker
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness
—  it is generally the by-product of other activities.
The true measure of success is how many times you can bounce back from failure.
— Stephen Richards
The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21)
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
— J.M. Barrie
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
— Joseph Addison
Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn't depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
These... things, householder, are welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world:Long life is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Beauty is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Happiness is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world.Status is welcome, agreeable, pleasant, & hard to obtain in the world....Now, I tell you, these... things are not to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes. If they were to be obtained by reason of prayers or wishes, who here would lack them? It's not fitting for the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life to pray for it or to delight in doing so. Instead, the disciple of the noble ones who desires long life should follow the path of practice leading to long life. In so doing, he will attain long life...]
— Gautama Buddha
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.
— Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.
— Elizabeth Berg, The Art of Mending
Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
— Carroll Bryant
When you are joyful, when you say yes to life and have fun and project positivity all around you, you become a sun in the center of every constellation, and people want to be near you.
— Shannon L. Alder
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.
— James Oppenheim
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
— Dennis Lehane
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
right in this moment, I can´t even remember what unhappy feels like.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Shiver
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks.
— Dalai Lama XIV
We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? (136-137)
— Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras
Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse
Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have.
— Doris Mortman
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
— H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
— C.S. Lewis
Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.
— Jacqueline Kelly, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.
— Marcel Pagnol
I shall take the heart. For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.
— L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.
— Marilyn Monroe, My Story
If you wish to be happy,Eragon, Think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and that which you are able to change
— Christopher Paolini, Brisingr
Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
— Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.
— Bobbe Sommer
Sometimes we must undergo hardships, breakups, and narcissistic wounds, which shatter the flattering image that we had of ourselves, in order to discover two truths: that we are not who we thought we were; and that the loss of a cherished pleasure is not necessarily the loss of true happiness and well-being. (109)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
— Bertrand Russell
Happiness only real when shared.
— Christopher McCandless
You must be the best judge of your own happiness.
— Jane Austen, Emma
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
— George Sand
Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don't. It's like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you'll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud.
— Dan Wells, Partials
Adrian tipped my face up toward his and kissed me. Like always, the world around me stopped moving. No, the world became Adrian, only Adrian. Kissing him was as mind-blowing as ever, full of that same passion and need I had never believed I’d feel. But today, there was even more to it. I no longer had any doubt about whether this was wrong or right. It was a culmination of a long journey . . . or maybe the beginning of one.I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer. I didn’t care that we were out in public. I didn’t care that he was Moroi. All that mattered was that he was Adrian, my Adrian. My match. My partner in crime, in the long battle I’d just signed on for to right the wrongs in the Alchemist and Moroi worlds. Maybe Marcus was right that I’d also signed myself up for disaster, but I didn’t care. In that moment, it seemed that as long as Adrian and I were together, there was no challenge too great for us.I don’t know how long we stood there kissing. Like I said, the world around me was gone. Time had stopped. I was awash in the feel of Adrian’s body against mine, in his scent, and in the taste of his lips. That was all that mattered right now.
— Richelle Mead, The Indigo Spell
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
— E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
If you've got nothing to dance about, find a reason to sing.
— Melody Carstairs
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."..."There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."..."But they used to take morphia and cocaine."..."Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."..."Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."..."Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."..."All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."..."Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."..."Stability was practically assured.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
— Albert Camus
You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.''You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?''You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside.
— Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now.
— Wayne W. Dyer
I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.
— Robin Williams
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
— Albert Schweitzer
With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy. 
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
A flower blossoms for its own joy.
— Oscar Wilde
You can't buy happiness
— Kurt Cobain
Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.
— Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society
It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.
— Lemony Snicket, The End
Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends
—  but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.
Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses
Happiness comes from within. It is not dependent on external things or on other people. You become vulnerable and can be easily hurt when your feelings of security and happiness depend on the behavior and actions of other people. Never give your power to anyone else.
— Brian L. Weiss
I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. 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 eat 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
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Exactly. How can you know it makes you happy if you’ve never experienced it?”“There are different kinds of happy,” she said. “Some kinds don’t need any proof.
— Jennifer E. Smith, This Is What Happy Looks Like
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
— William Blake
Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.
— Epicurus, A Guide To Happiness
Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity...When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.
— Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
— Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;Weep, and you weep alone;For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,But has trouble enough of its own.
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Poems of Passion
Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.
— Robert Anthony
Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Remember, happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think.
— Dale Carnegie
Success will be within your reach only when you start reaching out for it.
— Stephen Richards, Think Your way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free
I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks.
— Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich's ABC
Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.
— Pearl S. Buck
They will hate you if you are beautiful. They will hate you if you are successful. They will hate you if you are right. They will hate you if you are popular. They will hate you when you get attention. They will hate you when people in their life like you. They will hate you if you worship a different version of their God. They will hate you if you are spiritual. They will hate you if you have courage. They will hate you if you have an opinion. They will hate you when people support you. They will hate you when they see you happy. Heck, they will hate you while they post prayers and religious quotes on Pinterest and Facebook. They just hate. However, remember this: They hate you because you represent something they feel they don’t have. It really isn’t about you. It is about the hatred they have for themselves. So smile today because there is something you are doing right that has a lot of people thinking about you.
— Shannon L. Alder
We have to go. I'm almost happy here.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
As I focus on diligent joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once -- that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Judgment is a negative frequency.
— Stephen Richards
When your back is to the wall and you are facing fear head on, the only way is forward and through it.
— Stephen Richards, Releasing You from Fear
Got no checkbooks, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I've got the sun in the mornin' and the moon at night.
— Irving Berlin
That's the secret to life... replace one worry with another....
— Charles M. Schulz
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.
— Mark Strand, Selected Poems
Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.
— Jeremy Bentham
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
— Willa Cather, My Ántonia
The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.
— Ramana Maharshi
Before you can successfully make friends with others, first you have to become your own friend.
— Stephen Richards
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
— Albert Camus
Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
— Jane Austen, Emma
He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.
— Socrates
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
— Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
Beauty is the purest feeling of the soul. Beauty arises when soul is satisfied.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
...is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price.
— Orson Scott Card, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
— Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
For what prevents us from saying that the happy life is to have a mind that is free, lofty, fearless and steadfast - a mind that is placed beyond the reach of fear, beyond the reach of desire, that counts virtue the only good, baseness the only evil, and all else but a worthless mass of things, which come and go without increasing or diminishing the highest good, and neither subtract any part from the happy life nor add any part to it?A man thus grounded must, whether he wills or not, necessarily be attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys.
— Seneca, The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters
The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.
— Pete Wentz
When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
They say all marriages are made in heaven, but so are thunder and lightning.
— Clint Eastwood
Everybody has something, that one thing they must do to feel happy. I think this is yours, and I want you to be happy. You don’t have to do it, but it’s here if you choose to come back to it.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Bleeds
Well, I always know what I want. And when you know what you want--you go toward it. Sometimes you go very fast, and sometimes only an inch a year. Perhaps you feel happier when you go fast. I don't know. I've forgotten the difference long ago, because it really doesn't matter, so long as you move.
— Ayn Rand, We the Living
Mara, that's the life I want to give you. That's what I'm offering you. I want to fill you life with color and warmth. I want to fill it with light. Give me a chance
— Francine Rivers, Redeeming Love
Joy came always after pain.
— Guillaume Apollinaire
Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.
— J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu
I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.
— J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution
Compassion is the signature of Higher Consciousness. Non-violence is the tool to evolve into the Higher Consciousness.
— Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
It’s not about working for money, it’s about having money work for you.
— Stephen Richards
Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it.
— Alexandre Dumas
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
— Gustave Flaubert
A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.
— Hugh Downs
Be happy in the moment, that's enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.
— Mother Teresa
The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.
— Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they're important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators --these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others.
— Lisa Unger, Sliver of Truth
[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her step-monster's house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make herself easier to find. I always hoped that after the prince found Cinderella and they rode away in their magnificent carriage, after a few miles she turned to him and said, "Could you drop me off down the road please? Now that I've finally escaped my life of horrific abuse, I'd like to see something of the world, you know?... I'll catch back up with you later, Prince, once I've found my own way.
— Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies.
— Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering
— Albert Camus, The Plague
Happiness and confidence are the prettiest things you can wear
— Taylor Swift
The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
The thing everyone should realize is that the key to happiness is being happy for yourself and yourself.
— Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
— Elise Boulding
Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)
— Abraham Lincoln
To me, the meaning of a human life is to be happy. It's to achieve happiness right now, it's to make sure you're happy in the future. And if some people on YouTube try to have a message to give people, I guess that mine is: do whatever you have to do to be happy.
— Dan Howell
Sometimes you get everything you ever wanted, only it doesn't look like what you wanted anymore.
— Leila Sales, Past Perfect
When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.
— Vincent Starrett
In the end, the number of prayers we say may contribute to our happiness, but the number of prayers we answer may be of even greater importance.
— Dieter F. Uchtdorf
If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.
— Roman Payne
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
I'll never wake up in a good mood again.I'm tired of these stinky boots
— Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
Even in Siberia there is happiness.
— Anton Chekhov
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
— Ingrid Bergman
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
— Iris Murdoch
Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now.Let it teach you Being.Let it teach you integrity — which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real.Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
In the midst of happiness or despairin sorrow or in joyin pleasure or in pain:Do what is right and you will be at peace.
— Jess Rothenberg, The Catastrophic History of You and Me
I NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE POINT OF BEING SADWHEN I COULD CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY
— Megan McCafferty, Second Helpings
I guess money can't buy happiness if you shop in the wrong places.
— Nora Roberts, Tribute
Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away.
— Nenia Campbell, Endgame
There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.
— Ian McEwan, Saturday
The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them.
— J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution
Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
— Jacques Prévert
When you fail, that is when you get closer to success.
— Stephen Richards