Quotes About Happiness

The vision of the ideal life that we've been taught in the West, which is gaining ever more purchase in China and India and elsewhere, feeds the system we need to undo. Go to school in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to earn money so you can try to buy happiness because your life sucks, then retire and die: this is not meaningful living.

She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway.

It is now. It is always now. Now is good. Now could be the best. My name is Catcher. My name was Catcher. My name...my name... I am... I am lost, I am found and then I am free and I am happy. When I jump over that edge, someone leaps with me, shoulder to shoulder. I smell kinship on him. Kinship is all. I'm not alone. Never alone. I land, earth below me, moon above. I am wolf. We are pack. And that is all I need.

If you pray enough for things, I am proof that they can happen. I feel like a kid on Christmas day now, every day. It's something I have wanted for a long time and I am as happy as anyone to be here. It is great to be back at my first love.

You've got a beautiful country with so many beautiful people and so many beautiful things happening and stuff like that lets it down. I feel sad for them.

When our gifts are remembered and lived, we discard the idea that happiness requires an ideal life in which we are comparatively the best. Many beautiful and enjoyable things are messy and far from ideal. Some of the greatest cooks have the messiest of kitchens, and beautiful gardens are the result of sweat and dirt. As we move closer to our essence, we better understand that we can have a wonderful life in the absence of perfection.

Too often we develop a blindness for all of the wonderful things in life.

Too often we focus more on the nice house than the happy family living in it.

We cannot create joy and fulfillment by subtracting complexity and stress from our lives

As they become aware of how much time and energy they spend trying to garner approval, they can begin living an inside-out kind of life. This means, rather than focusing outward for acceptance and approval, they turn inward. In doing so, they can begin asking themselves the important questions: "What do I want," "What feels right to me," "What would make me happy?

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

Modern western man has some basic misconceptions about the nature of happiness. The origin of the word is instructive: happiness stems from the root verb to happen, which implies that our happiness is what happens.

The object of life is not happiness, but to serve God or the Grail. All of the Grail quests are to serve God. If one understands this and drops his idiotic notion that the meaning of life is personal happiness, then one will find that elusive quality immediately at hand.

Buddhas have more fun.

The strange thing about the messianic ideal of liberating yourself so that you can free all others is that just trying to adopt it makes you feel happier. Even though you know on some level that there is only so much you can get done in any given period of time, the fact that you do not let go of the determination to do everything gives you immense good cheer. (p. 20)

The world is what the individual makes it. A world of individuals is the intersubjective, collective mind field of all those individuals. Standing on the ground of freedom, we can see things afresh, enter relationships renewed and with a new purpose of sharing freedom and happiness. We can become poets and seers of reality. We can become great adepts, true individuals, agents of compassion. To live in a world is to be constantly creating that world. (p. 215)

One of my deep thoughts was that it is not so much particular disasters that make people cry, but something always there in life itself, something that a light falls on when we are trying to enjoy ourselves

She put her arms round him and kissed him. The kiss remained always with him, an agony in the mind: for then the two of them at last met and recognised one another. Later he supposed that this was indeed a moment's perfect happiness for him; but at the time the thought did not occur. Everything but the sea was dark and quiet and timeless. Thought and feeling had stopped and they were immortal. The moment was immortal.

Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.

Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy.

In life; have as much fun as you can get away with!

Is there no virtue among us?" asked James Madison, rhetorically. "If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.

The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.