Quotes About Happiness

Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently – though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

That's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.

The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights — namely, liberty.

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.

o zi f?r? îngheÈ›at? era o zi pierdut?.

I don't care the hell what other people eat so long as they enjoy it. I can't stand sad eaters and sad drinkers.

Freedom of speech carries the responsibility of thought. And we don't think. For all our gushing about living in a country dedicated to the proposition that everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we don't respect life, we don't understand liberty, and we have a perverted sense of happiness.

There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.

the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.

Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?

What idiocy, to racing into this story and its labyrinths, sprinting away from our happiness among the fresh spring grasses by the oak.

Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.

These were the months that shaped us.behind all our frustrations over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days.Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other.Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible-and soon there was only interruption.And in the end time did run out,but memories are still there,accusing us,and we still can't let each other alone.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

I will return. I will find you. Love you. Marry you. And live without shame.

I'm raising my glass to that love. May it never be denied, forgotten, distorted, or rejected as illusion. To our love. It happened. It was true.

And I was with the man I loved and we were rabbiting on about how we were going to help change the world, and we were on our way home to start our lives together. I even remember thinking to myself, I've never been happier than this. This is it!

A man newly in love knows what life is.

She had a knack or weakness for laughing boisterously at her own anecdotes—not, I thought, because she found herself funny, but because she thought that life needed celebrating and wanted others to join in.

In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

tooled cowboy boots, engraved hip flask and, in recognition of his new passion for geology, a nineteenth-century explorer's specimen hammer in a leather case. To bless his second adolescence on turning fifty, a trumpet that had once belonged to Guy Barker. These offerings represented only a fraction of the happiness she urged on him, and sex was only one part of that fraction, and only latterly a failure, elevated by him into a mighty injustice.