Happiness - christiansquoting.org.uk

For perfect happiness, remember two things:
(1) Be content with what you've got.
(2) Be sure you've got plenty.

Some don't prefer the pursuit of happiness to the happiness of pursuit.

Happy people produce. Bored people consume.

Some people cause happiness wherever they go. Other cause happiness whenever they go.

Happiness depends on happenings, but joy depends on Jesus.

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.

Happiness is not a matter of good fortune or worldly possessions. It's a mental attitude. It comes from appreciating what we have, instead of being miserable about what we don't have. It's so simple-yet so hard for the human mind to comprehend.

The happiest people don't necessarily have the best of everything. They just MAKE the best of everything.

The secret of happiness is to count your blessings while others are adding up their troubles.

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody. --Chinese Proverb

Call no day happy until it is done. Call no man happy until he is dead. -- Russian proverb, quoted Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, in _The Oak and the Calf_

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.--Scottish Proverb

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.--Joseph Addison

There are two types of people in this world: good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more. Woody Allen

Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient -- Aristotle

No one is really happy merely because he has what he wants, but only if he wants things he ought to want. --- Augustine

Happiness is often the result of being too busy to be miserable. &emdash;Frank Baer

I have been very happy, very rich, very beautiful much adulated, very famous and very unhappy.- Brigitte Bardot (1934-____)"London Times," 28 Sep 1984.

Before you put on a frown, make absolutely sure there are no smiles available. Jim Beggs

You are 100 percent responsible for your own happiness. Other people aren't responsible. Your parents aren't responsible. Your spouse isn't. You alone are. So if you are not happy, it's up to you to change something. It's not up to someone else to "fix it" for you. Dr. Gerald D. Bell

The trouble is not that we are never happy -- it is that happiness is so episodical.
Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) In "Webster's Electronic Quotebase," ed. Keith Mohler, 1994.

You might be poor, and unhappy; but become suddenly rich, and you will still be unhappy.-- Rick Beneteau

Happiness is good health and a bad memory. Ingrid Bergman.

Money can't buy happiness. It just helps you look for it in more places. --Milton Berle

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

A joyful and pleasant thing it is to be thankful. Book of Common Prayer (1662) Psalm 147, v. 16

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations. ~ Edward De Bono

We have no right to make people happy against their will. - James Boswell quoted in James Pope-Hennesy, Sins of the Fathers

We never have a long continuation of agreeable life. It is frequently interrupted, and a company who have been very happy together must have the pain of parting. After every enjoyment comes weariness or disgust. We never have a large lawn of agreeable life. It is cut to pieces with sunk fences, even where it is smoothest. -- James Boswell , letter, June 1774

Walter Hargrave: Are you as happy as you desire to be?
Helen Huntingdon: No one is so blest as that comes to on this side of eternity.
Anne Bronte ,The Tenant of Wildfell Hall p 257

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose. John Mason Brown

A little is as much as a lot, if it is enough. Steve Brown

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all. Jean de La Bruyere

It is the happiness of heaven to have God be all in all. - JEREMIAH BURROUGHS

...you can never be happy and dress yourself solely in the glass of other men's approval. -- .Nicholas Flood Davis, The Irishman in Canada, p. vii.

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

There is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Henry Drummond (1851-1897)

The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.-- Jonathan Edwards

The change that takes place in a man when he is converted and sanctified, is not that his love for happiness is diminished but only that it is regulated with respect to its exercises and influences, and the course and objects it leads to...when God brings a soul out of a miserable state and condition into a happy state of conversion, he gives him happiness that before he had not (namely in God), but he does not at the same time take away any of his love of happiness. JONATHAN EDWARDS

Only vegetables are happy.-William Faulkner

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.-Gustave Flaubert

A great obstacle to happiness is expecting too much happiness.-- Bernard de Fontanelle

All the Constitution guarantees is the pursuit of happiness. You have to catch up with it by yourself. --Benjamin Franklin

The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.-Olivia Goldsmith

Hagar to mountain-top guru: "What is the key to happiness?"
Guru: "Abstinence, poverty, fasting, & celibacy."
Hagar: "Is there someone else up there I could talk to?"- From Hagar the Horrible:

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

To believe that is we could but have this or that we would be happy is to suppress the realization that the cause of our unhappiness is in our inadequate and blemished selves. Excessive desire is thus a means of suppressing our sense of worthlessness. Eric Hoffer

No one has a right to happiness. Eric Hoffer

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. Kin Hubbard

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.---Victor Hugo, _Les Miserables_

The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. Robert Green Ingersoll

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits. Thomas Jefferson

That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment. - Samuel Johnson (Boswell: Life of Johnson)

[Entering the estate of Lord Scarsdale, Boswell describes a long list of assets indicating great wealth.] Boswell: "One should think that the proprietor of all this must be happy." Johnson: "Nay, Sir, all this excludes but one evil -- poverty." -- Boswell: Life of Johnson

The Europeans ... are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas [the character Imlac]

Let us cease to consider what, perhaps, may never happen, and what, when it shall happen, will laugh at human speculation. We will not endeavor to modify the motions of the elements, or to fix the destiny of kingdoms. It is our business to consider what beings like us may perform: each laboring for his own happiness by promoting within his circle, however narrow, the happiness of others. - Samuel Johnson: Rasselas [the charcater Rasselas]

We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them.-Juvenal

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.--- Immanuel Kant

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember. Oscar Levant

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. And the solution has been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. But for the contemporary mindset the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of man. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) Mere Christianity

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

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.
James Russell Lowell. 1819-1891. The Vision of Sir Launfal. Prelude to Part First.

Many persons 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

Happy is the man who has a wife to tell him what to do and a secretary to do it for him.--- Baron Mancroft

All the wealth in the world cannot be compared with the happiness of living together happily united. --Marie Marguerite of Youville (1701-1771)

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

Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts. Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) "Society in America," vol. 3, "Marriage," 1837.

Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.- Groucho Marx

God has so constituted our nature that we cannot be happy unless we are or think we are the means of good to others. We can scarcely conceive of greater wretchedness than must be felt by him who knows he is wholly useless in the world.
Erskine Mason (1805 - 1851)

Happiness is not a matter of events, it depends upon the tides of the mind.- Alice Meynell, 1847 - 1922

The key to happiness isn´t in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.- Dan Millman

There is something quite ridiculous, and even indecent, in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more, a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness, included along with life and liberty in the American Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase&emdash;the pursuit of happiness&emdash;is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world. To pursue happiness, individually or collectively, as a conscious aim is the surest way to miss it altogether; as is only too tragically evident in countries like Sweden and America where happiness has been most ardently pursued, and where the material circumstances usually considered conducive to happiness have been most effectively constructed.
The Gadarene swine were doubtless in pursuit of happiness when they hurled themselves to destruction over the cliff. Today, the greater part of mankind, led by the technologically most advanced, are similarly bent, and if they persist, will assuredly meet a similar fate. The pursuit of happiness, in any case, soon resolves itself into the pursuit of pleasure, something quite different&emdash;a mirage of happiness, a false vision of shade and refreshment seen across parched sand. Malcolm Muggeridge B.B.C. Broadcast, 5 October 1965

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Iris Murdoch (1919-____) Willy Kost, in "The Nice and the Good," ch. 22, 1968.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. George Orwell

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

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.- Blaise Pascal

Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory. - Norman Vincent Peale

The small share of happiness attainable by man exists only insofar as he is able to cease to think of himself. Theodore Reik

Individual human happiness is directly proportional to the degree of responsibility we assume for our emotions. W. Requadt

There is much satisfaction in work well done; praise is sweet; but there can be no happiness equal to the joy of finding a heart that understands. --Victor Robinson

Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.--- Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Reflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales.

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.- Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884 - 1962

I look at what I have and think myself unhappy; others look at what I have and think me happy.-Joseph Roux

I've made an odd discovery. Everytime I talk to a genius I feel quite sure that joy and happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet, when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite; joy and happiness is just around the corner.-Bertrand Russell

There can be no universal panacea for happiness which is obvious to anyone who has studied, as I have, the root causes of happiness and its opposite. Happiness is a state which is created within us by a very large and very varied number of factors. One man is happy with nothing less than a luxurious mansion and estate and a fleet of fast cars; another man is happy in a monk's cell with the minimum requirements of life. It would seem, therefore, that it is not what we actually possess which provides us with happiness, but our reactions to what we possess. The secret of happiness, like the kingdom of heaven, must be within us, and the key to it is our attitude towards life and especially towards our personal life.
Bertrand Russell, from the "after-death" state

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.-Bertrand Russell

One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.-Albert Schweitzer

True happiness is to understand our duties toward God and man; to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence on the future; not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is abundantly sufficient. -Seneca

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly, one-directionally, and without regret or reservation.
William H. Sheldon

What leads to unhappiness, is making pleasure the chief aim. William Shenstone (1714-1763)

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?
Adam Smith (1723-1790) In "The Speaker's Electronic Reference Collection," AApex Software,1994.

Call no man happy until he is dead; he is at best but fortunate. -- Solon, quoted in Herodotus, *Histories*

Call no day happy til it is done; call no man happy til he is dead. -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness. Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892)

Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin, 1935

The happiest people I know are the ones who have learned how to hold everything loosely and have given the worrisome, stress-filled, fearful details of their lives into God's keeping. - Charles R. Swindoll

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.-- Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

If the enjoyments of this life were certain, yet they are unsatisfying. This is the vanity of vanities, that every thing in this world can trouble us, but nothing can give us satisfaction... If we be hungry, we are in pain; and if we eat to the full, we are uneasy... So that we p[pursue the happiness of this world just as little Children chase birds, when we think we are come very near it and have it almost in our hands it flies farther from us than it was at first.-- John Tillotson, Sermon VIII

Wherever Stafford Cripps has tried to increase the sum total of human happiness, grass never grows again. The Times.

Happiness walks on busy feet. &emdash;Kitte Turmell

Whatever affection we have for our friends or our family, the happiness of others never suffices for our own. - Marquis de Vauvenargues

Happiness is an attitude of mind, born of the simple determination to be happy under all outward circumstances.... J. Donald Walters

You can't buy happiness, you can't buy health and you can't buy inner peace.
The Duke of Westminster, Britain's richest man with 1.75 billion pounds to his name

Expect no greater happiness in Eternity, than to rejoice in God. --Benjamin Whichcote

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go. - Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

You can't have everything. Where would you put it? ---Steven Wright