Quotes About Happiness

Where did the idea come from that we should take life so seriously, anyway? Why should a man be such a slave to his breadwinning? We ought to be able to get a good living, even to make fortunes, and yet have a good time every day of our lives. This idea of being a slave most of the time, and of only occasionally enjoying a holiday, is all wrong.

One of the worst doctrines ever set afloat is that real happiness is in material things instead of in a condition of mind.

Real happiness comes from the cultivation, the development, of the highest that is in us.

Fun is the cheapest and best medicine in the world for your children as well as for yourself. Give it to them in good large doses. It will not only save you doctors' bills, but it will also help to make your children happier, and will improve their chances in life.

Real happiness cannot be bribed by anything sordid or low.

The human mind is happiest when it is most active in performing the functions which it was intended to perform. One of man's greatest passions is that of achievement, the passion for doing things, the ambition to accomplish. This is one of the greatest satisfactions of life, and satisfaction is the chief ingredient in happiness.

A man can have no greater delusion than that he can spend the best years of his life coining all of his energies into dollars, neglecting his home, sacrificing friendships, self-improvement, and everything else that is really worth while, for money, and yet find happiness at the end!

The very habit of expecting that the future is full of good things for you, that you are going to be prosperous and happy, that you are going to have a fine family, a beautiful home, and are going to stand for something, is the best kind of capital with which to start life.

Lincoln said that "folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Learn to radiate joy, not stingily, not meanly, but generously. Fling out your gladness without reserve. Shed it in the home, on the street, on the car, in the store, everywhere, as the rose sheds its beauty and gives out its fragrance.

About as poor business as one can engage in is that of going through life with one's eyes so fixed upon what others have, that he cannot enjoy or appreciate his own.

I am success. Though hungry, cold, ill-clad, I wander for a while, and I smile and say: 'It is but for a time. I shall be glad tomorrow, for good fortune comes my way. God is my Father. He has wealth untold; His wealth is mine, health, happiness and gold.

Fear and doubt, discouragement and worry are always found together. They belong to the same family, and work for the same end — to rob people of energy and ambition, and to keep them from doing what they were made to do. They have ever been the great retarders of human progress, the great killers of ability, the blighters of happiness, the stranglers of aspirations, the murderers of success.

Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible.

The man who can smile when everything seems to go against him shows that he is made of winning material, for no ordinary man can do this. Carlyle says that some people are rich in the power to be miserable. Such people seem to have a genius for radiating mental poison. They project their gloom into your mind in spite of your efforts to protect yourself. They insist that they were born so, that they cannot help having the "blues" and being despondent.

You have no more right to go about among your fellows with a vinegary expression on your face, radiating mental poison, spreading the germs of doubt, fear, discouragement, and despondency upon them, than you have to inflict bodily injuries. You have no more right to poison other people's happiness than their bodies.

Robust health and optimism produce happiness. The power of a sunny soul to transform the most trying situations in life is beyond all power to compute. The world loves the sunny soul, the man who carries his holidays in his eye and his sunshine with him. The determination to be kind and helpful to every one, to be cheerful, no matter what comes to us, is a great happiness producer. When a man does not find repose in himself it is vain for him to seek it elsewhere.

If you have not what you like, like what you have until you can change your environment. Do not waste your vitality in hating your life; find something in it which is worth liking and enjoying, while you keep steadily at work to make it what you desire. Be happy over something, every day, for the brain is a thing of habit, and you cannot teach it to be happy in a moment, if you allow it to be miserable for years.

The trouble with us is that we try to find happiness where it does not exist, in transient, impermanent things; we try to find it in the gratification of desire; we seek it in animal pleasure. Happiness lives in giving, in doing, not in getting, in grasping.

We can so educate the will power that it will focus the thoughts upon the bright side of things, and upon objects which elevate the soul, thus forming a habit of happiness and goodness which will enrich the whole life. The habit of making the best of everything and of always looking on the bright side is a fortune in itself.

You, young man, make up your mind at the very outset of your career that whatever comes to you in life, that whether you succeed or fail, whether you have this or that, there is one thing you will have, and that is a happy, contented mind, that you will extract your happiness as you go along.

The first duty we owe a child is to teach him to fling out his inborn gladness and joy with the same freedom and abandon as the bobolink does when it makes the meadow joyous with its song. Suppression of the fun-loving nature of a child means the suppression of its mental and moral faculties. Joy will go out of the heart of a child after a while if he is continually suppressed.

The trouble with us is that we generally want more to make us happy than we deserve, and we are not grateful enough for the many things that are ours to enjoy.

It is the juices of youth, the joy and gladness carried along through the busy years that make old age tolerable.