Famous Quotes & Sayings

Will Durant

The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.

Sarah Bernhardt

Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.

Sarah Addison Allen

When you're happy for yourself, it fills you. When you're happy for someone else, it pours over.

Sarah Addison Allen

Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

you already possess all you need to be genuinely happy.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

The only person in all the world who can give you pleasure, or deny it, is yourself. No matter how much we love someone, the decision to experience pleasure, and to make room for it in our lives, is an internal one. If you are resistant, you could be around the most joyous people in the world and be miserable.

Sarah Ban Breathnach

... we can no longer afford to throw away even one 'unimportant' day by not noticing the wonder of it all. We have to be willing to discover and then appreciate the authentic moments of happiness available to all of us every day.

Samuel Pepys

I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.

Samuel Pepys

As happy a man as any in the world, for the whole world seems to smile upon me!

Samuel Rogers

Fireside happiness, to hours of ease Blest with that charm, the certainty to please.

William Feather

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

William Ellery Channing

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

Willem de Kooning

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

Saint Augustine

Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure: where your treasure, there your heart; where your heart, there your happiness

Saint Augustine

The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.

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.

Youssou N'Dour

I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa - the economic poverty, the corruption - there's a joy to living and a happiness in community, living together, in community life, which may be missing here in America.

William H. Seward

The United States are a political state, or organized society, whose end is government, for the security, welfare, and happiness of all who live under its protection.

William Hazlitt

The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.

William Hazlitt

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.