Quotes About Happiness

In brief, I consider solitude so necessary to happiness

But when love already keeps you warm, then there's no need to look for pleasure anywhere else.

When she had fallen asleep on me, and the saw in the yard was quiet, and a blackbird was singing as the colors of things in the kitchen dimmed until nothing remained of them but lighter and darker shades of gray, I was completely happy.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

A veces, un final doloroso hace que el recuerdo traicione la felicidad pasada. A lo mejor es que la única felicidad verdadera es la que dura siempre.

Ist diese Traurigkeit die Traurigkeit schlechthin? Ist sie es, die uns befällt, wenn schöne Erinnerungen im Rückblick brüchig werden, weil das erinnerte Glück nicht nur aus der Situation, sondern aus einem Versprechen lebte, das nicht gehalten wurde?

Weil Glück nur stimmt, wenn es ewig hält? Weil schmerzlich nur enden kann, was schmerzlich gewesen ist, unbewusst und unerkannt? Aber was ist ein unbewusster und unerkannter Schmerz?

Esa tristeza, ¿no será la tristeza pura? ¿Es eso lo que nos sobreviene cuando, al mirar atrás, los recuerdos hermosos se nos vuelven quebradizos, al ver que aquella felicidad no se alimentaba sólo de la situación del momento, sino de una promesa que no se cumplió?

A veces un final doloroso hace que el recuerdo traicione la felicidad pasada. A lo mejor es que la única felicidad verdadera es la que dura siempre. Porque sólo puede tener un final doloroso lo que ya era doloroso de por sí, aunque no fuéramos conscientes de ello, aunque lo ignorásemos. Pero un dolor inconsciente e ignorado ¿es dolor?

Warum wird uns, was schön war, im Rückblick dadurch brüchig, daß es häßliche Wahrheiten verbarg? Manchmal hält die Erinnerung dem Glück schon dann die Treue nicht, wenn das Ende schmerzlich war. Weil Glück nur stimmt, wenn es ewig hält? Weil schmerzlich nur enden kann, was schmerzlich gewesen ist, unbewußt und unerkannt?

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interest be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons who interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than imprisoning the minds of the young in rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.

The secret of happiness is very simply this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant, I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.