Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Bernard Shaw

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

George Bernard Shaw

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

Frederick William Faber

Kind words produce happiness. How often have we ourselves been made happy by kind words, in a manner and to an extent which we are unable to explain!

Frederick William Robertson

Brethren, happiness is not our being's end and aim. The Christian's aim is perfection, not happiness; and every one of the sons of God must have something of that spirit which marked his Master.

Franz Kafka

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

Erich Fromm

Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments.

Erich Fromm

Happiness is a man's greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the world outside.

Erich Fromm

The affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth and freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love.

George Eliot

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

George Eliot

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

Franz Schubert

You believe happiness to be derived from the place in which once you have been happy, but in truth it is centered in ourselves.

Francoise Sagan

happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.

Francoise Sagan

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

Chris Hardwick

Steal moments of happiness if you have to, and then collect them until they are the dominant images in your psyche.

Christopher Alexander

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself....The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Christina Rossetti

Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.

Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

George Porter

It is not only my laboratory and my place of work but also my home, so that on the 30th October I was able to share my happiness immediately with my students and collaborators and, at the same time, with my wife and family.

Garth Brooks

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

George Edward Woodberry

To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment.

George Eliot

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

George Eliot

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

George Eliot

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Fernand Braudel

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves very little trace in history.

Feist

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.

Fay Weldon

To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.

Fanny Brice

When love is out of your life, you're through in a way. Because while it is there it's like a motor that's going, you have such vitality to do things, big things, because love is goosing you all the time.

Fanny Kemble

Rome ... seems to me the place in the world where one can best dispense with happiness ....

Fanny Burney

How little has situation to do with happiness.

Fanny Burney

Those who wander in the world avowedly and purposely in pursuit of happiness, who view every scene of present joy with an eye to what may succeed, certainly are more liable to disappointment, misfortune and unhappiness, than those who give up their fate to chance and take the goods and evils of fortune as they come, without making happiness their study, or misery their foresight.