Famous Quotes & Sayings

Khalil Gibran

There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.

Jonathan Swift

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.

Jonathan Swift

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain and languor; it's like spending this year part of next year's revenue.

Jonathan Swift

If we take an examination of what is understood by happiness ... we shall find all its properties ... under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.

Jonathan Swift

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

Jonathan Swift

So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

Helen Fisher

Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it.

Helen Fisher

Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love.

Helen Fisher

The reason you take antidepressants is to feel calm. And romantic love is not calm -it's elation, it's mood swings, and you're killing all that when you take the drug.

Helen Fisher

Romantic love allows you to focus mating energy. Attachment sustains that relationship as long as necessary to raise your baby.

Helen Fisher

I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Mankind is interdependent, and the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and it is this lesson that humanity has to learn today as the first and the last lesson.

Henepola Gunaratana

You can only have bliss if you don't chase it.

Hector Hugh Munro

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

Henry David Thoreau

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.

Henry David Thoreau

I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

Henry David Thoreau

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Henry David Thoreau

My greatest skill has been to want but little.

Henry David Thoreau

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Henry David Thoreau

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

Henry David Thoreau

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry David Thoreau

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry Ford

Profit is a by-product of work; happiness is its chief product.

Malcolm Muggeridge

I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.

Malcolm Muggeridge

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Malcolm Muggeridge

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

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

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.