Quotes About Happiness

I often wonder if I am entitled to be as happy as I am, given the amount of suffering in the world.

Without a philosophy of life, we do not know how to react to what life deals us. Our happiness bounces up and down, determined by the day's events and the immediate emotions they elicit rather than by sober reflection. Without being able to place events into perspective—which comes from having a philosophy of life—we are at the mercy of events. Our ship has no destination and no compass.

The problem in our time is that maturity is not high on the list of goals we offer the next generation. We stress happiness, success, and intelligence but not maturity. And that is too bad, both for society, which suffers when too many of its members are immature, and for the individual who wants to be happy. For happiness is not available to the immature. And one of the prominent characteristics of immaturity is seeing oneself primarily as a victim.

We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be.

Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception.

Nevertheless, whatever road you choose, I would be surprised if Happiness Is a Serious Problem did not help you on that road.

We determine how much we will allow something to make us unhappy. That we can determine our emotional response to events is hard for many people to acknowledge. Most people think that events make them unhappy, that their happiness level is essentially dictated by what happens to them. But this is untrue.

One cannot be a good person without gratitude, and one cannot be a happy person without gratitude. This provides a vital link between goodness and happiness.

Raise children who are grateful in general, and grateful to be an American in particular, or grateful to be the citizen of any decent country, who don't complain much, who learn to handle losing, and who are guided by values, not feelings. In other words, teach them how to be happy adults.

All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.

The only happy people I know are people I don't know well.

instead of allowing the enormity of the world's sufferings to make me unhappy, I have allowed it to increase the depth of my gratitude for the blessed life that I have been allowed to lead. You can look at the amount of suffering in the world and become bitter (this world stinks), cynical (nothing matters, it's all just a roulette game), or hedonistic (with all this suffering, I'll rack up all the fun I can) – or you can be grateful for your blessings.

According to just about every poll on happiness, people on the Left are generally less happy than conservatives.

Or to put it another way, fun is during, happiness is during and after.

Human beings want to be happy, and they have a right to want to be. Far from being a selfish or ignoble goal, this is one of the distinguishing features of human beings. To the extent that animals can be said to want anything, what they want is to avoid pain and to be sated, but not to be happy.

In all my studies of happiness, one of the most significant conclusions I have drawn is that there is little correlation between the circumstances of people's lives and how happy they are. A moment's reflection should make this obvious to anyone. We know people who have a relatively easy life and who are essentially unhappy, and we know people who have suffered a great deal but maintained a relatively high level of happiness.

when people think or write about happiness, self-control is rarely stressed. … Yet happiness is impossible without self-control. In fact, everything we want is impossible without self-control. Ask anyone who has achieved what you particularly desire to achieve, and you will find a profoundly self-disciplined individual.

The happiness that the psychologically impaired achieve through religion alone is often the shallow happiness of the unexamined life.

One day, however, the thought occurred to me that being unhappy was easy—in fact, the easy way out—and that it took no courage, effort, or greatness to be unhappy. Anyone could be unhappy.

One of the most important lessons of life—one I believe most people never learn—is that almost everything important is a choice. We choose whether to be happy (or, at the very least whether to act happy), whether to be a hard worker, whether to be honest, whether to be kind, whether to see miracles, and, yes, whether to believe in God (or, at the very least, live as if there is a God).

But we pay a price for everyone's putting on a happy face—we start believing that life for everyone else is great. I wonder what effect

Expectations Undermine Gratitude, the Key to Happiness

Yes, there is a "secret to happiness"—and it is gratitude.

If we identify having fun with happiness, we will identify the opposite of fun, pain, with unhappiness. However, because no happiness is possible without pain, the attempt always to avoid it by having fun as much as possible makes happiness impossible