Famous Quotes & Sayings

Wilhelm von Humboldt

When we are not too anxious about happiness and unhappiness, but devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, then happiness comes of itself--nay, even springs from the midst of a life of troubles and anxieties and privations.

Walter Savage Landor

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

Walter Savage Landor

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

Walter Savage Landor

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

Walter Savage Landor

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

Walter Scott

The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.

Winifred Holtby

You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?

Winifred Holtby

Sorrow and frustration have their power. The world is moved by people with great discontents. Happiness is a drug. It can make men blind and deaf and insensible to reality. There are times when only sorrow can give to sorrow.

Winston Churchill

All wisdom is not new wisdom.

Winston Churchill

One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.

Winston Churchill

To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.

William S. Burroughs

Virtue is simply happiness, and happiness is a by-product of function. You are happy when you are functioning.

William Lyon Phelps

Real happiness is not dependent on external things.

William Lyon Phelps

If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care the happiest, individual would not be either a man or a woman it; it would be, I think a cow.

William Lyon Phelps

The principle of happiness should be like the principle of virtue: it should not be dependent of things, but be a part of personality [and character].

William Lyon Phelps

The kind of happiness that stays with you is the happiness that springs from inward thoughts and emotions.

William Lyon Phelps

Why is it that so many people are afraid to admit they are happy?

William Lyon Phelps

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.

Virginia Woolf

Safe! safe! safe!' the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry 'Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.

Woodrow Wilson

I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world.

Saint Augustine

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

Winston Churchill

Leave to the masters of art trained by a lifetime of devotion the wonderful process of picture-building and picture creation. Go out into the sunlight and be happy with what you see.

Wilma Rudolph

The triumph can't be had without the struggle.

Wilma Rudolph

'I can't' are two words that have never been in my vocabulary. I believe in me more than anything in this world.

William Steig

When they had eventually calmed down a bit, and had gotten home, Mr. Duncan put the magic pebble in an iron safe. Some day they might want to use it, but really, for now, what more could they wish for? They all had all that they wanted.

Zora Neale Hurston

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Zora Neale Hurston

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

Zac Efron

From day one, I got addicted to being on stage and getting the applause and laughter.

Zhuangzi

Now, when ordinary people attempt to find happiness, I am not sure whether the happiness is really happiness or not. I study what ordinary people do to find happiness, what they struggle for, rushing about apparently unable to stop.

Zhuangzi

The ultimate happiness is doing nothing.

Zhuangzi

When I look at what the world does and where people nowadays believe they can find happiness, I am not sure that that is true happiness. The happiness of these ordinary people seems to consist in slavishly imitating the majority, as if this were their only choice. And yet they all believe they are happy. I cannot decide whether that is happiness or not. Is there such a thing as happiness?

Zhuangzi

To be constant is to be useful. To be useful is to realize one's true nature. Realization of one's true nature is happiness. When one reaches happiness, one is close to perfection.

Zhuangzi

Perfect happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.