Happiness Quotes
Being happy is one of life’s lofty, and often elusive goals. We search high and low, looking for happiness in our partners, careers and so on. When things look dark, we can all use a simple reminder of what is truly important. With the help of these quotes, we can look into the lives and wise words of these great authors about happiness and how to uncover it.
Find below, inspiring quotes about happiness and being happy from famous authors. These quotes will help you in your pursuit of happiness.
80 Happiness Quotes & Sayings
“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.” – Ayn Rand
“Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – Aristotle
“Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.” – Benjamin Franklin
“It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.” – Charles Spurgeon
“We can’t control the world. We can only (barely) control our own reactions to it. Happiness is largely a choice, not a right or entitlement.” – David C. Hill
“Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.” – Douglas Jerrold
“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” – Frederick Keonig
“Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other. When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.” – Hazelmarie Elliott
“Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.” – Hosea Ballou
“Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” – Joseph Addison
“Happiness is only real when shared.” – Jon Krakauer
“The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.” – Joseph Roux
“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.” – Jane Austen
“Happiness is a direction, not a place.” – Sydney J. Harris
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.” – Immanuel Kant
“There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.” – Charlotte Bronte
“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley
“Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether it’s at work or with your family. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.” – Earl Nightingale
“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” – Freya Stark
“True happiness is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” – Helen Keller
“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.” – James Oppenheim
“Happiness is where we find it, but very rarely where we seek it.” – J. Petit Senn
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.” – John Stuart Mill
“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.” – Alain De Botton
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.” – Bertrand Russell
“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.” – Chinese Proverb
“I think the key to life is just being a happy person, and happiness will bring you success.” – Diego Val
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.” – Edith Wharton
“Happiness is a place between too much and too little.” – Finnish proverb
“All happiness depends on courage and work.” – Honoré de Balzac
“There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.” – Lady Blessington
“Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.” – Margaret Lee Runbeck
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius
“The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” – William Morris
“A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.” – Bernard de Fontenelle
“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.” – Chuck Palahniuk
“Happiness is being content with what you have, living in freedom and liberty, having a good family life and good friends.” – Divyanka Tripathi
“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.” – Epictetus
“Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” – Guillaume Apollinaire
“Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress – the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.” – Mark Manson
“In my life I’ve learned that true happiness comes from giving. Helping others along the way makes you evaluate who you are. I think that love is what we’re all searching for. I haven’t come across anyone who didn’t become a better person through love.” – Marla Gibbs
“Happiness is a well-balanced combination of love, labour, and luck.” – Mary Wilson Little
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“People should find happiness in the little things, like family.” – Amanda Bynes
“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.” – Buddha
“Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy.” – Cynthia Nelms
“The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.” – Doug Larson
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”– Eric Hoffer
“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.” – George Sand
“Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” – Iris Murdoch
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” – Mark Twain
“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.” – Maxim Gorky
“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.” – William Saroyan
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.” – Carl Jung
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” – Dalai Lama
“Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.” – Don Marquis
“Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time when it is not now.” – Gerald Jampolsky
“Happiness is distraction from the human tragedy.” – J.M. Reinoso
“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.” – Orhan Pamuk
“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.” – Pat Conroy
“It’s the moments that I stopped just to be, rather than do, that have given me true happiness.” – Sir Richard Branson
“Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.” – Mildred Barthel
“As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.” – Andrew Delbanco
“The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage.” – Carrie Jones
“Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.” – E.L. Konigsburg
“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” – Gabriel García Márquez
“Happiness is the experience of loving life. Being happy is being in love with that momentary experience. And love is looking at someone or even something and seeing the absolute best in him/her or it. Love is happiness with what you see. So love and happiness really are the same thing…just expressed differently.” – Robert McPhillips
“The happiness of life is made up of the little charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” – Robert Frost
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“Happiness is the natural flower of duty.” – Phillips Brooks
“Happiness is the resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other.” – Norman Bradburn
“Happiness is the default state. It’s what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in life.” – Naval Ravikant
“Real happiness is not of temporary enjoyment, but is so interwoven with the future that it blesses for ever.” – James Lendall Basford
“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.” – Dale Carnegie
“All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.” – Baruch Spinoza