Famous Quotes & Sayings

Polly Toynbee

Inequality makes everyone unhappy, the poor most of all, and that is well within the remit of the state. More money gives less extra happiness the richer we get, yet we are addicted to earning and spending more every year.

Pliny the Elder

The happier the moment the shorter.

Pliny the Elder

True happiness consists in being considered deserving of it.

Plutarch

We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things.

Plutarch

Choose what is best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.

Plutarch

Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.

Phillips Brooks

Happiness is the natural flower of duty.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

There is a gentle element, and man may breathe it with a calm, unruffled soul, and drink its living waters, till his heart is pure; and this is human happiness.

Nathaniel Branden

The tragedy of too many people is that they cannot allow happiness just to be there; they cannot leave it alone. Their sense of who they are and of what their destiny is cannot accommodate happiness. So they are drive to find ways to sabotage it.

Nathaniel Branden

Some people have a view of self and of the universe that obliges them to struggle for happiness, to yearn for happiness-"some time in the future"-perhaps next year or the year after that. But not now. Not at this moment. Not here. Here and now is too terrifyingly close, too terrifyingly immediate. They suffer from happiness anxiety.

Nathaniel Branden

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender -not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow--the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Mother Teresa

A joyful heart is like the sunshine of God's love, the hope of eternal happiness.

Mother Teresa

One filled with joy preaches without preaching.

Mother Teresa

God never sends us more than we can handle.

Mother Teresa

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Mother Teresa

Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Pearl S. Buck

To serve is beautiful, but only if it is done with joy and a whole heart and a free mind.

Pearl S. Buck

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.

Peter Ustinov

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.

Peter Ustinov

Laughter would be bereaved if snobbery died.

Terry Pratchett

It's tough at the top. It's tough at the bottom. But in between you could use them for horse-shoes.

Randall Jarrell

Read at whim! Read at whim!