Quotes About Happiness

How often have I watched, and longed to imitate when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had slipped his oars and lay flat on his back in the bottom of the boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky gliding slowly by above him, his face aglow with a foretaste of happiness and peace!

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.

In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting point for further desires. in a chapter called Desire and Despair

Oh, my poor little hawthorns," I was assuring them through my sobs, "it isn't you who want me to be unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you've never done me any harm. So I shall always love you." And, drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would set off for the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom.

Was the happiness of knowing these girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort which I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying?

It is a mistake," Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample fortune.

Pois a posse do que se ama é uma alegria ainda maior do que o amor.

that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.

there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.

With the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn't even interesting--because they say she's an idiot," she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

he said to himself that people did not know when they were unhappy, that they were never so happy as they supposed.

More than anything else the viscount's sad, sweet gaze made the boy feel like crying. Alexis knew that those eyes had always been sad and, even in the happiest moments, they seemed to implore a consolation for sufferings that he did not appear to experience. But at this moment Alexis believed that his uncle's sadness, courageously banished from his conversation, had taken refuge in his eyes, which, along with his sunken cheeks, were the only sincere things about his entire person.

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him!

We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it.

How often the prospect of future happiness is thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification!

And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And he

Já houve quem dissesse que a beleza é uma promessa de felicidade. Inversamente a possibilidade de prazer pode ser um começo de beleza.

now Andrée told me that if she had taken up athletic pastimes, it was under orders from her doctor, to cure her neurasthenia, her digestive troubles, but that her happiest hours were those which she spent in translating one of George Eliot's novels

Be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the gentle gardeners who make our souls blossom.

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification, But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler than his desire for her.

Confounded, though immortal. But his doom, reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him.

Heaven's last best gift, my ever new delight.