happiness
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘happiness’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“You’ve got to ask! Asking is, in my opinion, the world’s most powerful – and neglected – secret to success and happiness.” -Percy Ross
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“You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.” -Franz Schubert
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“We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, where I grew up.” -Mary…
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“My life has run from misery to happiness.” -Loretta Lynn
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“Happiness? No, it’s not there for me.” -Robert Mapplethorpe
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“Friendship is a strong and habitual inclination in two persons to promote the good and happiness of one another.” -Eustace Budgell
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“Life finds its purpose and fulfillment in the expansion of happiness.” -Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
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“Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.” -Holbrook Jackson
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“Try to put your happiness before anyone else’s, because you may never have done so in your entire life, if you really think about it, if you are really honest with yourself.” -Margaret Cho
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“Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God, as can be your own.” -William E. Gladstone
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“The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Every poll about the Left, the Right, and happiness reveals that the farther left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be.” -Dennis Prager
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“America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.” -Louis D. Brandeis
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“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.” -Anthony Trollope
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“Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.” -Arthur Rubinstein
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“True religion… is giving and finding one’s happiness by bringing happiness into the lives of others.” -William J. H. Boetcker
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“When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.” -Thornton Wilder
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“Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.” -Logan P. Smith
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“Happiness held is the seed Happiness shared is the flower.” -John Harrigan
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“A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.” -Elsa Schiaparelli
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“I am happy as happiness goes, for a woman who has so many memories and who lives the lonely life of an actress.” -Lillie Langtry
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“There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.” -Francois Fenelon
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“There is no happiness for people at the expense of other people.” -Anwar Sadat
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“It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.” -Elsie de Wolfe
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“I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.” -Harlan Coben
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“Getting married, for me, was the best thing I ever did. I was suddenly beset with an immense sense of release, that we have something more important than our separate selves, and that is the marriage. There’s immense happiness that can come from working towards that.” -Nick Cave
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“I’ve run into certain geniuses of individualism – they are very few and far between – who live their lives completely on their own terms they are very powerful and have a great amount of happiness. We all should aspire to that.” -David Duchovny
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“No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.” -Graham Greene
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“There is no correlation between happiness and amounts of money.” -Kesha
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“And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.” -Adam Weishaupt
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“As a child is indulged or checked in its early follies, a ground is generally laid for the happiness or misery of the future man.” -Samuel Richardson
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“Well, there are two kinds of happiness, grounded and ungrounded. Ungrounded happiness is cheesy and not based on reality. Grounded happiness is informed happiness based on the knowledge that the world sometimes sucks, but even then you have to believe in yourself.” -Andy Grammer
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“To play someone who is who they are because of the happiness and contentedness that they’ve known in their life is interesting because of sort of how banal it is.” -Christina Ricci
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“I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.” -Maurice Sendak
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“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” -Iris Murdoch
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“It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.” -Max Planck
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“It’s horrible when people are only interested in buying labels, because it doesn’t bring them the happiness they think it will.” -Miuccia Prada
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“I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me, that they would reward in more important ways, like happiness.” -Brandon Boyd
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“I enjoy being happy every day, and hopefully you can hear my happiness in my music. Life is beautiful.” -Christina Milian
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“All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.” -William Law
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“One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way.” -Isabelle Eberhardt
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“Happiness isn’t happiness unless there’s a violin-playing goat.” -Julia Roberts
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“The most exciting happiness is the happiness generated by forces beyond your control.” -Ogden Nash
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“Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man’s hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.” -Don Marquis
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“Happiness comes when we test our skills towards some meaningful purpose.” -John Stossel
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“I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time I mean joy.” -Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Happiness is perfume, you can’t pour it on somebody else without getting a few drops on yourself.” -James Van Der Zee
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“I have often met with happiness after some imprudent step which ought to have brought ruin upon me, and although passing a vote of censure upon myself I would thank God for his mercy.” -Giacomo Casanova
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“Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!” -Lawrence…
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“I don’t understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?” -Joni Mitchell
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“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 Morgan
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“The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.” -Mortimer Adler
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“There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them happiness. But what, in fact, does is having a cause, having a passion. And that’s really what gives life’s true…
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“We’ve got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that’s easier. It’s much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.” -Emma Thompson
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“The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.” -Gary Larson
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“It takes great wit and interest and energy to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a great activity. One must be open and alive. It is the greatest feat man has to accomplish.” -Robert Herrick
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“Holiness, not happiness, is the chief end of man.” -Oswald Chambers
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“Happiness is nothing but temporary moments here and there – and I love those. But I would be bored out of my mind if I were happy all the time.” -Zoe Saldana
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“What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?” -Adam Smith
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“I can be forced to live without happiness, but I will never consent to live without honor.” -Pierre Corneille
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“The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.” -William Ellery Channing
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“To be able to throw one’s self away for the sake of a moment, to be able to sacrifice years for a woman’s smile – that is happiness.” -Hermann Hesse
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“Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.” -Irving Babbitt
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“There is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving.” -Henry Drummond
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“Happiness and peace will come to earth only as the light of love and human compassion enter the souls of men.” -David O. McKay
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“The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.” -Hannah Arendt
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“I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.” -Havelock Ellis
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“But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth that is the happiness of being truly loved.” -Lafcadio Hearn
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“Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort.” -Helen Gurley Brown
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“It’s enough to indulge and to be selfish but true happiness is really when you start giving back.” -Adrian Grenier
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“I don’t know the true meaning of happiness.” -Jonathan Davis
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“Maturity – among other things, the unclouded happiness of the child at play, who takes it for granted that he is at one with his play-mates.” -Dag Hammarskjold
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“No one is guaranteed happiness. You can pursue it, but if you happen to find success along the way on that road to happiness, Conservatives believe you should not be demonized or penalized for it.” -Glenn Beck
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“The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy they want to be right.” -Quentin Crisp
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“I’ve never felt like I was in the cookie business. I’ve always been in a feel good feeling business. My job is to sell joy. My job is to sell happiness. My job is to sell an experience.” -Debbi Fields
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“The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.” -Jonathan Edwards
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“Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul.” -George A. Smith
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“Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.” -Henri Matisse
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“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.” -Charles Baudelaire
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“Off with you! You’re a happy fellow, for you’ll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that!” -Ludwig van Beethoven
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“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” -Freya Stark
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“You get to a certain age where you prepare yourself for happiness. Sometimes you never remember to actually get happy.” -John Mayer
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“Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.” -Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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“Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.” -Billy Wilder
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“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
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“When you relinquish the desire to control your future, you can have more happiness.” -Nicole Kidman
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“It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business.” -Dolley Madison
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“The will of man is his happiness.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.” -Douglas Horton
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“I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That’s what happiness is.” -Michael J. Fox
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“Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.” -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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“Happiness is a sunbeam which may pass through a thousand bosoms without losing a particle of its original ray nay, when it strikes on a kindred heart, like the converged light on a mirror, it reflects itself with redoubled brightness. It is not perfected till it is shared.” -Jane Porter
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“In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.” -Franz Kafka
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“Happiness is a very small desk and a very big wastebasket.” -Robert Orben
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“My faith helps me understand that circumstances don’t dictate my happiness, my inner peace.” -Denzel Washington
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“There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.” -Maria Mitchell
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“Today, we stand as a united country and are much closer to the ideals set forth in our Constitution that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” -Jim Ryun
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“Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one’s wife alone.” -Guru Nanak
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“Objects we ardently pursue bring little happiness when gained most of our pleasures come from unexpected sources.” -Herbert Spencer
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“For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.” -Jimmy Carter
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“The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all. It doesn’t guarantee our rights to charity.” -Jesse Ventura
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“Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don’t necessarily know how to obtain happiness.” -Gregg Easterbrook
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“Success is getting and achieving what you want. Happiness is wanting and being content with what you get.” -Bernard Meltzer
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“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain.” -John Stuart Mill
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“Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.” -John Dewey
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“God’s children and their happiness are my reasons for being.” -Red Skelton
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“I wish people could acheive what they think would bring them happiness in order for them to realize that thats not really what happiness is.” -Alanis Morissette
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“We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.” -Maxwell Maltz
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“Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.” -William Feather
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“Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.” -William Cowper
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“Now I believe that lovers should be draped in flowers and laid entwined together on a bed of clover and left there to sleep, left there to dream of their happiness.” -Conor Oberst
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“The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.” -Olivia Goldsmith
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“I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.” -Arthur Rimbaud
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“Crying is cleansing. There’s a reason for tears, happiness or sadness.” -Dionne Warwick
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“Alas! if the principles of contentment are not within us, the height of station and worldly grandeur will as soon add a cubit to a man’s stature as to his happiness.” -Laurence Sterne
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“People truly reaching across boundaries – be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual’s pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal.” -Jon Huntsman, Jr.
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“Happiness is mental harmony unhappiness is mental inharmony.” -James Allen
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“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
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“If you have not taken the time to define what happiness means to you, what have your spent your whole life pursuing?” -Bo Bennett
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“So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.” -Paul Ryan
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“Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.” -Rush Limbaugh
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“I might have some character traits that some might see as innocence or naive. That’s because I discovered peace and happiness in my soul. And with this knowledge, I also see the beauty of human life.” -Tobey Maguire
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“Unhappiness is something we are never taught about we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn’t arrive.” -Doug Coupland
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“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” -Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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“Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.” -John Lubbock
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“I know not why there is such a melancholy feeling attached to the remembrance of past happiness, except that we fear that the future can have nothing so bright as the past.” -Julia Ward Howe
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“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.” -Emile M. Cioran
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“Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!” -Oliver Goldsmith
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“A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.” -Theodor Adorno
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“Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.” -Alphonse de Lamartine
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“The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.” -Martha Washington
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“When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse.” -Sophocles
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“And one who is just of his own free will shall not lack for happiness and he will never come to utter ruin.” -Aeschylus
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“To desire and strive to be of some service to the world, to aim at doing something which shall really increase the happiness and welfare and virtue of mankind – this is a choice which is possible for all of us and surely it is a good haven to sail for.” -Henry Van Dyke
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“A good way I know to find happiness, is to not bore a hole to fit the plug.” -Josh Billings
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“Happiness is secured through virtue it is a good attained by man’s own will.” -Thomas Aquinas
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“You take away all the other luxuries in life, and if you can make someone smile and laugh, you have given the most special gift: happiness.” -Brad Garrett
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“Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“Happiness is your dentist telling you it won’t hurt and then having him catch his hand in the drill.” -Johnny Carson
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“False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.” -Charles de Montesquieu
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“Happiness isn’t getting what you want, it’s wanting what you got.” -Garth Brooks
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“What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.” -Henny Youngman
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“Although the skills aren’t hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant.” -Mario Batali
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“My whole thing is to agree to disagree and to have respect because nothing can really be changed and you wouldn’t want to ruin their happiness – even if that happiness is ignorance.” -Katy Perry
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“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” -Eric Hoffer
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“You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can’t see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that’s me.” -Vivien Leigh
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“I’m fulfilled in what I do. I never thought that a lot of money or fine clothes – the finer things of life – would make you happy. My concept of happiness is to be filled in a spiritual sense.” -Coretta Scott King
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“What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.” -Andre Gide
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“A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.” -Stendhal
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“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.” -George Santayana
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“I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.” -Thomas Huxley
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“The secret of happiness is something to do.” -John Burroughs
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“Self-esteem is as important to our well-being as legs are to a table. It is essential for physical and mental health and for happiness.” -Louise Hart
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“People are surprised at how down-to-earth I am. I like to stay home on Friday nights and listen to ‘The Art of Happiness’ by the Dalai Lama.” -Carmen Electra
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“Happiness is within. It has nothing to do with how much applause you get or how many people praise you. Happiness comes when you believe that you have done something truly meaningful.” -Martin Yan
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“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
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“Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.” -Michael Novak
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“I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.” -Edward Gibbon
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“Completeness? Happiness? These words don’t come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.” -Anita Baker
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“Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.” -Joseph Addison
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“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.” -Marcel Proust
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“You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.” -Horace
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“There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man – that is, the more divine – the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.” -Miguel de Unamuno
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“Music should probably provide answers in terms of lyrical content, and giving people a sense of togetherness and oneness, as opposed to being alone in their thoughts and dilemmas or regrets or happiness or whatever.” -Peabo Bryson
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“A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.” -James Madison
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“Money may not buy happiness, but it can damn well give it!” -Freddie Mercury
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“I hump the wild to take it all in, there is no bag limit on happiness.” -Ted Nugent
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“Every day is a new day, and you’ll never be able to find happiness if you don’t move on.” -Carrie Underwood
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“The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.” -Doug Larson
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“When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things – not the great occasions – that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness.” -Bob Hope
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“Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness.” -Mason Cooley
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“Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.” -Alexander Pope
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“My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.” -Clara Schumann
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