Quotes on Happiness

If we had no faults, we would not derive so much pleasure from noting those of other people.

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

All the daily routine of life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized conditions.

Perfect happiness, I believe, was never intended by the Deity to be the lot of one of his creatures in this world; but that he has very much put in our power the nearness of our approaches to it is what I have steadfastly believed.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.

The most congenial social occasions are those ruled by cheerful deference of each for all.

It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.

Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately.

To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.

Reproof should not exhaust its power upon petty failings.

Labor and trouble one can always get through alone, but it takes two to be glad.

The state of life is most happy where superfluities are not required and necessities are not wanting.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky.

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.