"People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be."
— Abraham Lincoln

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

"Happiness is a warm puppy."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"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

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
— George Burns

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."
— Robert Frost

"Happiness depends upon ourselves."
— Aristotle

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"try and expect nothing,
but be OPEN for anything.
Don't look far for happiness,
but never settle for anything less.
"
— C. S

"Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get"
— W.P. Kinsella

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy."
— Guillaume Apollinaire

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."
— Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)

"You can never be happy at the expense of the happiness of others."
— Chinese Proverb

"Happiness is a place between too little and too much."
— Finnish Proverb

"Memory is the happiness of being alone."
— Lois Lowry (Anastasia Krupnik)

"I am very happy
Because I have conquered myself
And not the world.
I am very happy
Because I have loved the world
And not myself."
— Sri Chinmoy

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants 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. LeGuin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)

"The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances."
— Martha Washington

"When the heart is at ease , the body is healthy."
— Chinese Proverbs

"Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure"
— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one."
— Edmund Burke

"Obscurity and competence-that is the life that is best worth living."
— Mark Twain

"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)

"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

"“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

"Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"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)

"How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richards 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 its as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the ponds 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 its 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)

"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

"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

"Why have a bad attitude towards life when there's so many things to be happy about? Try being outgoing!"
— Amanda Haselden

"I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride."
— Dumas (Le Comte De Monte Christo)

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. "
— Elinor Smith

"Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's."
— Bertrand Russell (The Impact of Science on Society)

"The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H. "
— Dan Savage (Skipping Towards Gomorrah)

"Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest, to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication."
— Algernon Blackwood

"What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round."
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"Is there a place called happiness?"
— Tammy Huang