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Quotes About Happiness

I myself have never been enchanted by the dream of the white wedding, and, heaven help us, the expectation that this exquisitely catered event should be 'the happiest moment' of one's life.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of 'Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?' Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you're so content.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
I'm choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I'm making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
And then I say to myself that we should believe in that which we felt when we were strong and happy rather than in that which we feel when we are sick and sad. Do you not think, Judith, that one is more truly oneself in times of joy than in times of sorrow?
~ Elizabeth Goudge
He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid, and the present would always confuse her because she would never entirely live in it.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
What is the scent of water?" "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew. Mary, it is most alarming, the way you make me talk. I don't talk to anyone else as I do to you. I'd be ashamed to." Mary was suddenly aware of wealth and when he asked her again, "Well, are you happy?" she replied with absolute truth, "Yes, I am.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
It was because it was so full of white wings that Fairhaven was such a happy place; wings of the yachts, of the seagulls, and of the swans . . . . White wings are for ever happy, symbols of escape and ascent, of peace and of joy, and a spot of earth about which they beat is secure of its happiness.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
to know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother but must be a Grandmother
~ Elizabeth Goudge
There was a happy chirping in the cloakroom as the children put on their walking shoes. Mary, standing at the door, thought they might have been sparrows, so loud was the chirping and so fulfilled with satisfaction. Perhaps the purpose of sparrows, as of children let out of school, was just to remark loudly and with repetition that in spite of any appearance to the contrary everything is quite all right.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
If happiness was now beyond his reach, he could at least know respite, and respite, with its lifelong rhythm, can in the awareness of it be called by the name of peace.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
It takes a happy marriage to make light of small things.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
It's been a happy partnership." "It's been like dew coming down on dry earth, or like dead bones living.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
It was always a cheerful street, for the people who lived in it were the happiest sort of people: not too poor, the joy of life ground out of them by poverty, and not too rich, feeling burdened by possessions; and the dead had left some of their happiness behind them in the homes they had made, and the living were daily adding to it out of their own good cheer.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
She had "green fingers" and knew them to be one of the happiest gifts that the gods can give.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
There was a streak of austerity in him that welcomed hardship, and even, he imagined, was ready to welcome pain. It bred courage, it sifted the true from the false, and courage and truth were companions who would outpace all the others; when dreams had withered and happiness was forgotten they were still there. For their sakes he was prepared to suffer much himself and to see others suffer. Lucilla had been right to recognize in his face that night a hint of ruthlessness.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
I'm still happy," said Marianne. "One can be happy and miserable both at once, you know.
~ Elizabeth Goudge
I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. The people are not characters, there is no plot in the usual sense. What can you bring to bear: verisimilitude — to what? You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy.
~ Elizabeth Hardwick
I usually describe my father as a man given to impenetrable solitude. If I turn the phrase I can apply it to Johnny. Impenetrable happiness. For a long time I couldn't enter his life because his happiness, or appearance of happiness - his unending smiles - locked the door. An ingenious strategy, to surround the thorns with a castle.
~ Elizabeth Hay
When we first met, his face broke into a full-out smile. Not one of those polite smiles you give a stranger on the street. No, the smile sped up my heart and brought on a whole new definition to the word beautiful.
~ Elizabeth Heller
I'm lost in a sea of smiles as laughter echos all around me.
~ Elizabeth Heller