Quotes About Happiness

There's going to be another wedding in the family!

Emily, I decided, was the best Mother's Day present ever.

Cat-food breath or not, I was thrilled to have Tigger back - and Logan, too.

Christmas books.

This is beautiful," said Gabbie, looking at the tea party and trying to sound grown-up. "It is too, too diveen," added Myriah. Mary Anne giggled. She and the girls drank their tiny cups of punch and ate their cookies. Then they drank the bears' and the dolls' punch and ate some of their cookies, too. "Did you like the party?" Mary Anne asked Gabbie when it was over. Gabbie nodded. "I loved it. It was too, too diveen.

I just love checking our mailbox. There is something about getting mail that is exciting. Going out to the box each afternoon is sometimes the highlight of my day.

And I began to dance too.

Admit I find everything strange and foreign. She finds a metaphor for her condition without defining it. It is my concern for happiness that cause me the most anguish. She now used him to perform her own tragedy for herself.

most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won't enjoy any of it.

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.

It is time we recognized that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.

Values are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures

we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain?

most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

While feeling love for others is surely one of the greatest source of happiness, it entails a very deep concern for the happiness and suffering of those we love. Our own search for happiness, therefore, provides a rationale for self-sacrifice and self-denial.

The promise of spiritual life - indeed, the very thing that makes it 'spiritual' in the sense I invoke throughout this book - is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. Scientists and skeptics generally

To say that something is "natural," or that it has conferred an adaptive advantage upon our species, is not to say that it is "good" in the required sense of contributing to human happiness in the present.24 Admittedly, the problem of adjudicating what counts as happiness, and which forms of happiness should supersede others, is difficult—but so is every other problem worth thinking about.

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really questions about happiness and suffering of sentient creatures

Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one's favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world—but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.