From the Experts

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

A great obstacle to happiness is the expectation of too great a happiness.
-- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
-- Robertson Davies

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
-- Ruth Bell Graham

A family endures only if its members abide by some implicit limits on their anger toward each other. Bickering, unhappiness, and estrangement are not modern inventions. What's modern is our conceit that we can purchase relief from these ills by expressing rather than controlling our anger.
-- Peter Wood

Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person.
-- David M. Burns

All happily married people have managed to accept the fact that marriage is no better and no worse than any other human institution. Also, perhaps even more important, they have learned to accept themselves and each other for what they really and honestly are.
-- Ernest Havemann

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.
-- Baltasar Gracián

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

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.
-- Bette Davis

Be virtuous and you'll be happy? Nonsense! Be happy and you'll begin to be virtuous.
-- James Gould Cozzens

Change is an easy panacea. It takes character to stay in one place and be happy there.
-- Elizabeth Clarke Dunn

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
-- Alice Walker

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

Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels.
-- Bertolt Brecht

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

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.
-- Elbert Hubbard

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

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Happiness comes most to persons who seek it least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought, it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not you overtake it.
-- John Burroughs

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Happiness doesn't depend on what we have, but it does depend on how we feel toward what we have. We can be happy with little and miserable with much.
-- William Dempster Hoard

Happiness doesn't depend on who you are or what you have; it depends solely upon what you think.
-- Dale Carnegie

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

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

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
-- Russell Baker

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.
-- John Lubbock

Happiness is not a reward -- it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment -- it is a result.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll

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

Happiness is often the result of being too busy to be miserable.
-- Frank Baer

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
-- William Maxwell

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

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.
-- Albert Schweitzer

Happy people plan actions, they don't plan results.
-- Dennis Wholey

How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy.
-- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
-- Paul Sweeney

How small a portion of our life is that we really enjoy. In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that have gone past. In things that are present, even that is too often absorbed in vague determination to be vastly happy on some future day, when we have time.
-- Charles Caleb Colton

Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
-- George Washington

I do not know of any sure way of making others happy as being so one's self.
-- Sir Arthur Helps

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

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us least live so as to deserve it.
-- Immanuel Hermann Fichte

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

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.
-- Montesquieu

If we spend our lives in loving, we have no leisure to complain, or to feel unhappiness.
-- Joseph Joubert

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.
-- Edmund Burke

If you have nothing else to do, look about you and see if there isn't something close at hand that you can improve! It may make you wealthy, though it is more likely that it will make you happy.
-- George Matthew Adams

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
-- Richard Bach

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
-- The Dalai Lama

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

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

I have always believed that the key to a happy marriage was the ability to say with a straight face, "Why, I don't know what you're worrying about. I thought you were very funny last night and I'm sure everybody else did, too."
-- Miss Manners

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. First, let her think she's having her own way. And second, let her have it.
-- Lyndon Johnson

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.
-- Blaise Pascal

I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
-- Fannie Hurst

In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy.
-- Karl Reiland

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

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
-- Mohandas Gandhi

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
-- André Gide

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

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

It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest men. When you see 20 or 30 men line up for a distance race in some meet, don't pity them, don't feel sorry for them. Better envy them instead.
-- Brutus Hamilton

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

It is the people who can do nothing who find nothing to do, and the secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one's uses.
-- Sarah Orne Jewett

It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it.
-- Gregg Easterbrook

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
-- Albert Camus

Just think how happy you would be if you lost everything you have right now, and then got it back again.
-- Francis Rodman

Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.
-- Jim Rohn

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance.
-- Adam Smith

Life is not always what one wants it to be, but to make the best of it, as it is, is the only way of being happy.
-- Jennie Churchill

Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. If anyone finds out he'll become happy at once.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Many bores are so obviously happy that is a pleasure to watch them.
-- Robert S. Lynd

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

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

Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other: it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age!
-- Charles Caleb Colton

Money and time are the heaviest burdens in life: and among mortals, those who are most unhappy are the ones who have more than they need.
-- Samuel Johnson

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness.
-- Henrik Ibsen

Money never prevented anyone from being happy or unhappy.
-- Eddie Barclay

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
-- Artemus Ward

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

Most people are searching for happiness. They're looking for it. They're trying to find it in someone or something outside of themselves. That's a fundamental mistake. Happiness is something that you are, and it comes from the way you think.
-- Wayne Dyer

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

My father's people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness.
-- C.S. Lewis

Never pursue happiness, for you will find it hard to catch. It will always be just beyond your grasp. Produce warm, friendly thoughts of others, and happiness will come to you. You will get out of life exactly what your thought-pattern guides your Inner-consciousness to express. Stop living life haphazardly. Start planning for happiness and contentment.
-- Forrest Shaklee

No mockery in the world ever sounds to me as hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness ... Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
-- Charlotte Bronte

Nothing blocks happiness like happiness remembered.
-- André Gide

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 first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
-- Margaret Young

One puts into one's art what one has not been capable of putting into one's existence. It is because he was unhappy that God created the world.
-- Henri de Montherlant

Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.
-- Robertson Davies

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness. Permanence means paralysis and death. Only in movement, with all its pain, is life.
-- Jakob Burkhardt

Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.
-- Jerome K. Jerome

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.
-- Anton Chekhov

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.
-- Sydney J. Harris

People say money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made.
-- Joan Rivers

People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.
-- Jerome K. Jerome

Perfect happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
-- Henri-Frederic Amiel

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

Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.
-- Og Mandino

Seek happiness and you may or may not find it; seek grievances and you are guaranteed success.
-- Gregg Easterbrook

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

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.
-- William Feather

Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor ...Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.
-- Mother Teresa

Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.
-- Charles F. Kettering

Success is not they key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
-- Albert Schweitzer

Thank heaven you can't buy happiness. We couldn't stand the commercials.
-- Rick Jones

That which makes people dissatisfied with their condition, is the chimerical idea they form of the happiness of others.
-- James Thomson

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-- Henry Ward Beecher

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
-- William Lyon Phelps

The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past.
-- André Maurois

The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-- Allan K. Chalmers

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.
-- Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular reason for being happy except that they are so.
-- William Inge

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions -- the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy.
-- John Quincy Adams

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes.
-- Leo Tolstoy

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
-- C.P. Snow

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball,
and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.
-- Ogden Nash

There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make happiness.
-- John Buchan

There's an old line that goes like this: An optimist is usually happy. And a pessimist is usually right. Maybe so. But which would you rather be, anyway?
-- Joe Posnanski

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
-- F.H. Bradley

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

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.
-- Henry David Thoreau

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself.
-- Victor Hugo

The unspoken creed of culture implies an obstinate determination to be happy at all costs.
-- John Cowper Powys

The world owes all its forward impulse to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.
-- Bette Midler

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
-- Confucius

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.
-- Holbrook Jackson

To be happy with a man, you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman, you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.
-- Helen Rowland

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

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

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.
-- Antoine de Rivarol

Tolstoy famously wrote that "happy families are all alike," and maybe they're alike chiefly in not expecting to be happy all the time.
-- Frederica Mathewes-Green

Too often the pursuit of happiness (not the pursuit of fun or excitement) is regarded as a selfish pursuit, when in fact it is one of the best things a person can do for everyone in his life and for the world at large. The Founders of America were brilliant in many ways, not more so than by enshrining that pursuit alongside the pursuit of life and liberty.
-- Dennis Prager

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
-- Erich Fromm

True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self; and, in the next, from the friendship and conversations of a few select companions.
-- Joseph Addison

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
-- Edward de Bono

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

We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.
-- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

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

We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
-- Maxwell Maltz

We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men who we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice, and prejudice. How absurd.
-- Jean de La Bruyère

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?
-- Adam Smith

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
-- Leo Tolstoy

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

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How many times is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
-- Jane Austen

You can never be happily married to another until you get a divorce from yourself. Successful marriage demands a certain death to self.
-- Jerry McCant

You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help.
-- Jean Kerr

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

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.
-- Albert Camus

We welcome any suggestions, contributions, or questions. You send it, we'll consider using it. Help us spread the word. And the music. And thanks for visiting.