Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

Henry David Thoreau

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Henry David Thoreau

My greatest skill has been to want but little.

Henry David Thoreau

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Henry David Thoreau

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

Henry David Thoreau

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.

Henry David Thoreau

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry David Thoreau

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Henry Ford

Profit is a by-product of work; happiness is its chief product.

Malcolm Muggeridge

I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.

Malcolm Muggeridge

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Malcolm Muggeridge

The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.

Malcolm Muggeridge

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

James Russell Lowell

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.

James Russell Lowell

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.

Laurence Sterne

Positiveness is a most absurd foible. If you are in the right, it lessens your triumph; if in the wrong, it adds shame to your defeat.

Laurence Sterne

There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho' there can be no happiness without pleasure--yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.--We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.

Friedrich Schiller

The great happiness of life, I find, after all, to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty.

Friedrich Schiller

When you are not happy with your life, always think that someone is happy simply because you exist

Friedrich Schiller

Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change.

Frederick the Great

Books make up no small part of human happiness.

George Gissing

I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?

Johnny Carson

Happiness is a tiger in your tank and a pussycat in your back seat.

Johnny Carson

Happiness is being stuck in an elevator and discovering the ravishing blonde with you is a liquor salesman with a case of samples.

Johnny Carson

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented.

Luigi Pirandello

When [man] is happy he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.

Ludwig van Beethoven

You're a happy fellow, for you'll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Love, and love alone, is capable of giving you a happier life.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the amenities of the world. To it the amenities of the world are so many graces of fate.