Quotes About Happiness

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world.

Ik geloof soms dat de koppigheid waarmee mensen aan tradities vasthouden, voldoende is om iedere hoop op te geven dat de mensheid door rationele maatregelen gelukkiger zal worden.

Wat zij mij gaf, was voldoende. Misschien waren het korstjes brood, eigenlijk voor de meeuwen bestemd; ik was er gelukkig mee, of kon doen alsof.

Most of us are just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.

Joy is that delight which is perceived from the conjunction, and communion of the chief good.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill.

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.

It is impossible that happiness, and yearning for what is not present, should ever be united."3

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

anger, as I've said, is incompatible with joy.

Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

According to Seneca, "A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is." He therefore recommends that we "do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: 'None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured!'" After all, what point is there in "being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy?"21

How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.

Musonius Rufus tells us that if we live in accordance with Stoic principles, "a cheerful disposition and secure joy" will automatically follow.

WHAT DO YOU WANT out of life?

Lawrence C. Becker puts it, "Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish."16 In the words of the historian Paul Veyne, "Stoicism is not so much an ethic as it is a paradoxical recipe for happiness.