Quotes About Happiness

Having children is life's greatest joy. But there are some people, and maybe you are one of them, who don't like kids, and consider travel life's greatest joy. You shouldn't have kids. Don't have them.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness

Beauty is a promise of happiness.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decent job, good health, and a roof over her head, did she regularly and so childishly collapse into moist sobs?

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.

A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. Beauty is the promise of happiness, he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.

The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness; of how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sigh of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze. I resolved to travel to the island of Barbados.

for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.