Famous Quotes & Sayings

Michael Korda

Success is the next best thing to happiness, and if you can't be happy as a success, it's very unlikely that you would find a deeper, truer happiness in failure.

Markus Zusak

Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?

Markus Zusak

But for now, happiness throws stones. It guards itself. I wait.

Mark Twain

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Mark Twain

Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.

Mark Twain

To be busy is man's only happiness.

Mark Twain

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

Marianne Williamson

Sadness is just a place on the map. Don't try to avoid it, resist it or escape through substances. Settle it, allow it, and it will go.

Marianne Williamson

Happiness requires that we give up a worldly orientation-not worldly things, but a worldly attachment to things. We have to surrender all outcomes. We have to live here but appreciate the joke.

Marianne Williamson

I have learned from experience that happiness is an acquired skill. Children are one of the greatest lessons in happiness, constantly challenging us to enjoy the moment, as the next one will not be the same. Gratitude is essential to happiness. Every time our children rush up to us and smile, we have something to be happy about; every time we get out of bed and can take a deep breath and go out for a walk, we have something to be happy about-that is the essence of a happy existence. Happiness is a muscle we must use, or it will wither away.

Marianne Williamson

The universe is wired with the electricity of God, & each of us is a lamp. It doesn't matter the size or shape of the lamp; it only matters that the lamp is plugged in. With every prayer, every thought of forgiveness, every meditation, every act of love, we plug in. The more of us who plug in, to more the darkness of the world will be cast from our midst. Today, let's all increase love's wattage!

Marianne Williamson

I have lived large parts of my life in wonderful circumstances that I utterly failed to appreciate. Reasons to be happy were everywhere, but somehow I didn't connect with them. It was as though I was eating but couldn't taste the food. Finally, I've learned to celebrate the good while it's happening. I feel gratitude and praise today for what are sometimes such simple pleasures. I have learned that happiness is not determined by circumstances. Happiness is not what happens when everything goes the way you think it should go; happiness is what happens when you decide to be happy.

Germaine Greer

People who are really happy do not concern themselves with convincing others of the fact.

Hans Christian Andersen

Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, 'I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.

Hans Christian Andersen

Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.

Hans Christian Andersen

To be of use to the world is the only way to be happy.

Frances Wright

... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

George Washington

The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.

George Washington

Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.

George Santayana

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

George Santayana

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

George Santayana

The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.

George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

George Orwell

But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them.

George Orwell

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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