Quotes About Happiness

I could spend the whole afternoon telling you about him, but it's not gonna do much good, is it? You never smelled his hair after he just got out of the bath, or carried him from the car after he'd fallen asleep on the way home, or heard the way he laughed when someone tickled him. So you'll just have to take my word for it: He was a great kid and he made you glad to be alive.

she remained unreconciled to the loss of her electric toothbrush. She'd pined for it for weeks before realizing that it was more than the sensation of a clean mouth that she missed—it was her marriage, all those years of mindless domestic happiness, long, crowded days that culminated with her and Kevin standing side by side in front of the dual sinks, battery-operated wands buzzing in their hands, their mouths full of minty froth.

Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Don't trust anybody who'd rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.

Hard times and funky living can season the soul, true enough, but joy is the yeast that makes it rise.

Beer's nice for being glad and dizzy, and sometimes for the mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart.

Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.-

To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.

I don't think that a novel is supposed to be a guide book to happiness any more than it's supposed to be a journal of one's personal pain and frustration, which most novels are today, unfortunately. I think the novels that are most important are those that are more on the order of those coyotes that howl on the hills outside of town. Something mysterious and wild and hypnotic.

And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.

the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment

Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second - happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothing to wait for

There's just one thing in this life that's better than happiness and that's freedom. It's more important to be free than to be happy.

When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.

Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, says an old French dictum—to live happily, live hidden.

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us.

HENRY: You don't get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather. DEBBIE: And happiness? HENRY: Happiness is . . . equilibrium. Shift your weight.

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls.

Ich lächele. Nicht kontrolliert, nicht beabsichtigt, nicht, weil ich das Gefühl habe, dass ich muss. Ic h lächele, weil ich glücklich bin