Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anton Chekhov

Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one's eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.

Anton Chekhov

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.

Anton Chekhov

Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they'll find a means to be happy.

Anton Chekhov

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Anton Chekhov

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

bell hooks

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

bell hooks

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

Baltasar Gracian

Surfeits of happiness are fatal.

Baltasar Gracian

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.

Ariel Gore

In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

Ariel Gore

I think there are different kinds of happiness. We know when we're happy a lot of the time, but then there are those moments that have more of an afterglow, when the happiness has more depth.

Ariel Gore

The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?

Anthony Trollope

As to happiness in this life it is hardly compatible with that diminished respect which ever attends the relinquishing of labour.

Diane Duane

Those who don't know the mistakes of the past won't be able to enjoy it when they make them again in the future.

Diane Arbus

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies.

Diane Arbus

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

Diane Ackerman

Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.

Delphine de Girardin

For ages happiness has been represented as a huge precious stone, impossible to find, which people seek for hopelessly. It is not so; happiness is a mosaic, composed of a thousand little stones, which separately and of themselves have little value, but which united with art form a graceful design.

Demetri Martin

The Pursuit of Happiness: It sure seems to like a good chase, doesn't it?

Dean Koontz

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

Daniel Gilbert

Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.

Daniel Gilbert

The secret of happiness is variety, but the secret of variety, like the secret of all spices, is knowing when to use it.

Daniel Gilbert

Lower your cortisol level. The happiest people have the lowest level of cortisol, a stress hormone that raises blood pressure and weakens the immune system. Cut the stress-more yoga, less road rage-and you'll cut your cortisol production.

Daniel Gilbert

We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't.

Daniel Gilbert

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.

Daniel Handler

It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

Calvin Coolidge

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.

Bryant H. McGill

There is no happiness outside of ourselves.

Bryant H. McGill

Wish for the happiness of your enemies, for if they are happy, they are your enemy no more.

Celia Green

The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

Alan Lightman

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Alain de Botton

Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.

Alain de Botton

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.