200 Happiness Quotes

Saturday, July 26th 2008 by Shanel Yang        Email this article to a friend Email this article to a friend

Can anyone have too much happiness? Or too many happiness quotes? 200 might be pushing it. : )

I started out looking for 100, but there were just too many thought-provoking quotes on this all-important, yet thoroughly engrossing, topic to stop at 100.

Since we just finished “Day 3: Childhood Happiness” of the “All About You!” series, this list of happiness quotes is a nice little apropros break before moving on next week to Days 4, 5, and 6 (Childhood Traumas and Triumphs and Sibling Rivalries).

Thanks to all of you who are following me on this journey! I was afraid that the number of readers would drop while I focused on such a serious, soul-searching topic, but the numbers are actually growing! So, I’m trusting that there is enough continued interest to carry on with this project for the full 30 days to the end.

Occasionally, I’ll lighten the load with more “fun” posts like this one. Variety is the spice of life! While we do the vital work of finding out (1) who we are, (2) what we want, and (3) how best to get there from here, it’s good to take little breaks along the way, sit a spell to refuel for the next leg of the journey ahead, and just relax!

200 QUOTES ABOUT HAPPINESS

1. Independence is happiness.
- Susan B. Anthony

2. Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable than risk being happy.
- Robert Anthony

3. Now and then, it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
- Guilaume Apollinaire

4. Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.
- Aristotle

5. Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.
- Aristotle

6. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
- Aristotle

7. Indeed, man wishes to be happy, even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
- St. Augustine

8. Real happiness is cheap enough; yet, how dearly we pay for its counterfeit!
- Hosea Ballou

9. Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
- James M. Barrie

10. Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
- John Barrymore

11. Happiness is a conscious choice—not an automatic response.
- Mildred Barthel

12. The essentials to happiness are something to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
- William Blake

13. If you ever find happiness by hunting for it, you will find it—as the old woman did her lost spectacles—safe on her own nose all the time.
- Josh Billings

14. There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
- Lady Blessington

15. It is only possible to live “happily ever after” on a day to day basis.
- Margaret Bonnano

16. Happiness is the resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings, rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.
- Norman Bradburn

17. Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
- Robert Brault

18. Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
- Phillips Brooks

19. People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.
- H. Jackson Browne

20. Cheerfulness is what greases the axles of the world. Don’t go through life creaking.
- H. W. Byles

21. All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.
- Lord Byron

22. Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.
- Buddha

23. Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
- Buddha

24. Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
- Pearl S. Buck

25. What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.
- Leo Buscaglia

26. You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
- Albert Camus

27. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
- Albert Camus

28. To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
- Albert Camus

29. You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
- Albert Camus

30. It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
- Dale Carnegie

31. 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

32. That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great.
- Willa Cather

33. Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself—no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are—completely; the good and the bad—and make changes as YOU see fit—not because you think someone else wants you to be different.
- Stacey Charter

34. Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.
- Colette

35. To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread.
- Charles Caleb Colton

36. Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
- Charles Caleb Colton

37. There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
- Salvador Dali

38. Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament; and, for anything I know, it may be glandular. But, it is not something that can be demanded from life; and, if you are not happy, you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
- Robertson Davies

39. As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.
- Andrew Delbanco

40. Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold. The feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.
- Democritus

41. The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
- Ernest Dimnet

42. He has the most who is most content with the least.
- Diogenes

43. Action may not always bring happiness; but, there is no happiness without action.
- Benjamin Disraeli

44. Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up, as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

45. To fill the hour—that is happiness.
- Georges Duhamel

46. It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely.
- Georges Duhamel

47. If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal—not to people or things.
- Albert Einstein

48. The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
- Albert Ellis

49. You just have to do your own thing—no matter what anyone says. It’s your life.
- Ethan Embry

50. Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

51. Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

52. The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
- Epictetus

53. There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
- Epictetus

54. Luckier than one’s neighbor, but still not happy.
- Euripides

55. Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.
- William Feather

56. People love others not for who they are but for how they make them feel.
- Irwin Federman

57. Happiness, it seems to me, consists of two things: first, in being where you belong; and second—and best—in comfortably going through everyday life, that is, having had a good night’s sleep and not being hurt by new shoes.
- Theodor Fontane

58. A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
- Fontenelle

59. We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
- Anne Frank

60. Think of all the beauty that’s still left in and around you, and be happy!
- Anne Frank

61. The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
- Anne Frank

62. The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
- Benjamin Franklin

63. There are two ways of being happy. We must either diminish our wants or augment our means. Either may do; the result is the same. And, it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.
- Benjamin Franklin

64. Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
- Sigmund Freud

65. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
- Sigmund Freud

66. All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.
- Horace Friess

67. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
- Robert Frost

68. Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
- Mahatma Gandhi

69. Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
- Dave Gardner

70. He is happiest—be he king or peasant—who finds peace in his home.
- Johann von Goethe

71. Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands. But, let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
- Maxim Gorky

72. Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile; but, sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

73. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
- Sydney J. Harris

74. Happiness is as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

75. You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
- Don Herold

76. Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
- Don Herold

77. Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.
- Burton Hills

78. The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
- Eric Hoffer

79. The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole—and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

80. It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.
- Kin Hubbard

81. The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved—loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
- Victor Hugo

82. On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
- William R. Inge

83. Happiness is a form of courage.
- Holbrook Jackson

84. How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is, in fact, for most men, at all times, the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
- William James

85. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
-Storm Jameson

86. It is neither wealth nor splendor—but tranquility and occupation—which give happiness.
- Thomas Jefferson

87. Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.
- Thomas Jefferson

88. Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.
- Douglas Jerrold

89. Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
- Samuel Johnson

90. We are, long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
- Samuel Johnson

91. There are as many nights as days; and, the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness; and, the word “happy” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
- Carl Jung

92. Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
- Immanuel Kant

93. When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but, often, we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
- Helen Keller

94. Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller

95. No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.
- Helen Keller

96. We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but, rather, of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
- Frederick Keonig

97. We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
- Charles Kingsley

98. Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
- E. L. Konigsburg

99. We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.
- Walter Savage Landor

100. The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
- Doug Larson

101. Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And, if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.
- Norman Lear

102. Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln

103. When you’re really happy, the birds chirp and the sun shines even on cold dark winter nights, and flowers will bloom on a barren land.
- Grey Livingston

104. Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve.
- Robert S. Lynd

105. Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- Norman Macewan

106. When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
- Niccolo Machiavelli

107. There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life—happiness, freedom, and peace of mind—are always attained by giving them to someone else.
- Peyton Conway March

108. Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
- Don Marquis

109. We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.
- Mignon McLaughlin

110. Happiness is like the penny candy of our youth: We got a lot more for our money back when we had no money.
- Mignon McLaughlin

111. Many things can make you miserable for weeks; few can bring you a whole day of happiness.
- Mignon McLaughlin

112. There is only one cause of unhappiness: The false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.
- Anthony de Mello

113. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.
- Alice Meynell

114. Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.
- John Stuart Mill

115. Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
- John Stuart Mill

116. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive!
- Henry Miller

117. The mind is its own place; and, in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
- John Milton

118. The only time I was truly happy was as a child, before I knew what happiness was, or wasn’t.
- D. H. Mondfleur

119. I hate being happy. It pisses me off. Because I know if I try to grab it, it will slip away, like one of those goddamn water snakes. And, I hate just looking. I always try to grab.
- D. H. Mondfleur

120. The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change. Happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
- Charles L. Morgan

121. The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.
- Francois de Motteville

123. To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.
- Robert Muller

124. Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness, being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
- Iris Murdoch

125. Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy.
- Cynthia Nelms

126. One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers.
- Eugene O’Neill

127. Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment—a little makes the way of the best happiness.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

128. We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

129. Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!
- Friedrich Nietzsche

130. The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
- James Oppenheim

131. It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.
- Thomas Paine

132. 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

133. Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.
- Norm Papernick

134. The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
- M. Scott Peck

135. Man must search for what is right, and let happiness come on its own.
- Johann Pestalozzi

136. Everything exists in limited quantity, especially happiness.
- Pablo Picasso

137. Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
- Jaques Prevert

138. The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony.
- V.S. Pritchett

139. Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
- Marcel Proust

140. My Happiness is not the means to my end. It is the end.
- Ayn Rand

141. Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same.
- Francesca Reigler

142. It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
- Agnes Repplier

143. Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it.
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

144. I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
- John D. Rockefeller

145. Happiness is not a goal. It is a by-product.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

146. Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

147. The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.
- Joseph Roux

148. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.
- Arthur Rubinstein

149. Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
- Margaret Lee Runbeck

150. The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
- Bertrand Russell

151. Man needs for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
- Bertrand Russell

152. If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
- Bertrand Russell

153. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
- Bertrand Russell

154. The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
- Bertrand Russell

155. All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming—a joy so thrilling that, if it was born of misery, we remembered even the misery with tenderness.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

156. The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
- J. D. Salinger

157. It doesn’t matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years—we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.
- Sharon Salzberg

158. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.
- George Sand

159. A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness. Happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will and is gladly accepted.
- George Santayana

160. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
- William Saroyan

161. A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.
- Seneca

162. Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
- Albert Schweitzer

163. I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
- Albert Schweitzer

164. Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
- Albert Schweitzer

165. The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
- George Bernard Shaw

166. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
- George Bernard Shaw

167. Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.
- George Bernard Shaw

168. Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow—or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.
- John B. Sheerin

169. There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

170. The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase. If you pursue happiness, you’ll never find it.
- C. P. Snow

171. Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.
- Palmer Sondreal

172. Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
- Sophocles

173. When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.
- Sophocles

174. What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
- Baruch Spinoza

175. There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
- Freya Stark

176. There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

177. The happy man is not he who seems thus to others, but who seems thus to himself.
- Publilius Syrus

178. Happiness is … usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
- Thomas Szasz

179. So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.
- Booth Tarkington

180. Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.
- William Makepeace Thackeray

181. Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth … Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us, also. To get joy, we must give it; and, to keep joy, we must scatter it.
- John Templeton

182. I can only think of one thing greater than being happy; and, that is to help another to be happy, too.
- Jim Thompson

183. That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
- Henry David Thoreau

184. If you want to be happy, be.
- Leo Tolstoy

185. Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.
- Mark Twain

186. The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
- Mark Twain

187. Happiness is a Swedish sunset—it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it.
- Mark Twain

188. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.
- Jim Valvano

189. Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
- Denis Waitley

190. The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.
- Martha Washington

191. You need to learn to be happy by nature, because you’ll seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance.
- Lavetta Sue Wegman

192. If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.
- Edith Wharton

193. When I was a child, people simply looked about them and were moderately happy. Today, they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
- E. B. White

194. The truest greatness lies in being kind; the truest wisdom in a happy mind.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

195. Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
- Oscar Wilde

196. My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate.
- Thornton Wilder

197. The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

198. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.
- W. Beran Wolfe

199. Often people attempt to live their lives backwards. They try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
- Margaret Young

200. Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
- Yevgeny Zamyatin

CONCLUSION

There seem to be some pretty diverse views about what happiness is, how to get it, or even if it’s something that we should or could even realistically hope to achieve. What do you think? Is happiness the journey, the destination, or both? Does happiness consist of loving, sharing, and otherwise interacting positively with others, or does it reside primarily within ourselves? Is striving for more happiness somehow a way of being ungrateful for what we already have? I hope not.

I’m happy. Every day, I feel so fortunate to have all that I have (my health, my boyfriend, my friends, my knowledge, my skills, my experiences, my dreams, and especially the freedom to spend my days doing everything I love and nothing I hate). But, I know I can look forward to even more happiness! I love reading and responding to your comments and email, and I expect more of that as I continue blogging, always with the purpose of trying to provide the best information, advice, and tip I can. Then, there are the books, TV show, schools, and foundation that I look forward to. All promise to be as challenging as they will be rewarding—both in the working toward, and in the final achievement of, these truly huge goals!

Knowing I’m working toward goals I really care about makes me happier than I ever imagined possible. Then, again, my boyfriend is a constant source of delight, joy, and pleasure. But, my relationship with him wouldn’t be half as great if I were not utterly thrilled with my new career as a blogger. It’s all connected. Which is why I designed this blog with the focus on People, Work, and Money, in that order.

[Note: More happiness quotes in the comments below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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[For “300 Friendship Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Love and Marriage Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Forgiveness Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Family Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Interesting Quotes by Women,” click here.]

[For “100 Health Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Existence Quotes,” click here.]

[For “300 Dream Quotes,” click here.]

[For all posts about different QUOTES, click here.]

[For “25 Statements to Happiness,” click here.]

[For “30 Statements for Great Relationships,” click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with People,” click here.]

7 Responses to “200 Happiness Quotes”

  1. Ken Wong Says:

    happiness is a warm puppy!!!

  2. Shanel Yang Says:

    Love that one, too! It’s by Charles Schultz attributed to Charlie Brown. Two more:

    “Happiness is morning and evening,
    Day time and night time, too.
    For happiness is anything and anyone at all
    That’s loved by you.”

    “Happiness is being alone every now and then.”

  3. Shanel Yang Says:

    201. In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
    - Richard Bach

    202. It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.
    - Lucille Ball

    203. One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody, everything, every night before you go to bed.
    - Bernard M. Baruch

    204. There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them.
    - Vicki Baum

    205. Laughter is an instant vacation.
    - Milton Berle

    206. The world’s literature and folklore are full of stories that point out how futile it can be to seek happiness. Rather, happiness is a blessing that comes to you as you go along—a treasure that you incidentally find.
    - Louis Binstock

    207. You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
    - Dale Carnegie

    208. The most wasted day of all is that during which we have not laughed.
    - Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort

    209. We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
    - Cyril Connolly

    210. Boredom is a sickness, the cure for which is work. Pleasure is only a palliative.
    - Le Duc de Lévis

    211. The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.
    - Louis-Ferdinand Destouches

    212. There is only one passion—the passion for happiness.
    - Denis Diderot

    213. A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
    - Bob Dylan

    214. The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us—of becoming happy—is not attainable: Yet, we may not—nay, cannot—give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
    - Sigmund Freud

    215. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
    - Sigmund Freud

    216. Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time. What we really want is for things to remain the same, but get better.
    - Sydney J. Harris

    217. Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
    - William Hazlitt

    218. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
    - Carl Jung

    219. Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.
    - Rollo May

    220. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
    - Richard M. Nixon

    221. Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
    - Pablo Picasso

    222. Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
    - Channing Pollock

    223. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
    - Ayn Rand

    224. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
    - Ayn Rand

    225. Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.
    - Theodore Isaac Rubin

    226. I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end; nor, do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
    - Bertrand Russell

    227. Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
    - Bertrand Russell

    228. 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. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.
    - George Sand

    229. The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
    - Carl Sandburg

    230. The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.
    - Arthur Schopenhauer

    231. As far as pleasures, you’ve got to have limits. You shouldn’t have too much of good things, so you’ll always have a desire for more and you won’t get bored.
    - Compay Segundo

    232. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
    - Robert Louis Stevenson

    233. The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.
    - Alfred Lord Tennyson

    234. How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
    - Mark Twain

    235. [Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but, only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
    - Mark Twain

    236. We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
    - W. B. Yeats

  4. maria Says:

    I so much enjoyed reading all your “happiness” quotes.
    Thanks for putting them all together for us.

    Maria

  5. Shanel Yang Says:

    Hi Maria! Thanks for your comment! So glad you liked them! : )

  6. Algis Kemezys Says:

    Happiness is knowing you can laugh at lifes toughest moments without being laughed at.

  7. Shanel Yang Says:

    Hi Algis! Thank you for sharing your great quote with all of us! Much appreciated!

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