Quotes About Happiness

It is therefore incumbent on us, from generation to generation, to create a sphere in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.

Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are "in the midst of great prosperity.

in which we can live, live freely, and pursue happiness to the best of our abilities. We cannot guarantee equal outcomes, but we must do all we can to ensure equal opportunity.

Garry Wills's classic 1978 book on the Declaration, Inventing America, put it well: "When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness," Wills wrote, "he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal.

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness.

We should be like dogs.

America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.

We're not going to get the jack-booted thugs stomping on a human face that you get in '1984' but we might get the 'Brave New World' where the biggest problem there is how to deal with the fact that everyone is so happy...[W]hat we're going to get is a nanny-type of fascism, if we get one at all...[S]imply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

I happily played the clown, Because I am a clown.

I wish I knew the flavor of my happiness.

Sometimes happiness is like the sound of a plane overhead. You look up to see it but the plane's not there. No matter where you look you can't find it on the sky, although the sound is still there and growing louder. You get a little frantic searching. At the same time you're thinking, this is stupid. But you keep looking and if you do finally see it, you feel absolved. Most of my life I'd been looking for happiness in the wrong parts of the sky.

Listening to him, I realized how lucky I was not to have had a wonderful childhood. Those who do, or those who peak in their early years, have only that remembered joy or strength to tide them over the rest of their lives. Nothing could ever be as good as that time; for them nothing ever is.

Whatever else it throws at you, life will always have pleasures to offer. And we should take them.

Take It and Like It

I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

This is great,' said Terry. 'This is so much better than sitting in my room watching Written on the Wind.

Sometimes there can be more to life than making a profit, Dorothy.

Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.

I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.

You see a person with kids," she said, "and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you're attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.

I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter. Does that make any sense?

I am a firm believer in family life. I feel that the home is the foundation of true happiness...much more the foundation than the church (or temple) or the school can ever be.