another page of quotations and passages on happiness

One of the best ways to worship
God is simply to be happy.

Traditional Hindu saying

Those who never sacrificed a present to a future good, or a personal to a
general one, can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors.

Horace Mann

A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found;
for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.

Thomas Merton

We can make countless journeys to
find happiness, and engage in countless
strategies to rid ourselves of unhappiness,
but the key traveler on all the journeys
and the central player in all the strategies
is ourselves, and it is to ourselves we
always return. . . . We discover happiness
through making peace with ourselves and
the circumstances of our lives, no through
trying to escape from them, nor through
living in fantasies about the future.

Christina Feldman

Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies
in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used,
the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which,
shirking pain, misses happiness as well.

Mary Cholmondeley

The people who are unhappy when they are poor would be unhappy
if they were rich, and they who are happy in a palace in Paris
would be happy in a dug-out on the frontier of Dakota. There are
as many unhappy rich people as there are unhappy poor people.
Every heart knows its own bitterness and its own joy.
Not that wealth and what it brings is not desirable—
books, travel, leisure, comfort, the best food and clothing,
agreeable companionship—but all these do not necessarily
bring happiness and may coexist with the deepest wretchedness,
while adversity and penury, exile and privation
are not incompatible with the loftiest exaltation of the soul.

John J. Ingalls

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but
the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world.
Both attitudes are within our power, so that people are happy
so long as they choose to be happy, and no one can stop them.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mood of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form. . . happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.

Charles L. Morgan

Happiness is a present attitude--not a future condition.

Hugh Prather

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements
of life, when all that we need to make us really happy
is something to be enthusiastic about.

Charles Kingsley

The real secret of happiness is simply this: to be willing to live and let
live, and to know very clearly in one's own mind that the unpardonable sin
is to be an unpleasant person.

Galen Starr Ross

Happiness is the greatest paradox in nature. It can grow in any soil,
live under any conditions. It defies environment. The reason for this
is that it does not come from without but from within. Whenever
you see people seeking happiness outside themselves, you can be sure
they have never yet found it.

Forman Lincicome

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important
requirements for happiness. My answer was: “A feeling that you have
been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have
done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work;
and the ability to love others.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally.
Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild-goose chase,
and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly
we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

When we recognize that nothing has to go right for us to be happy,
that people do not have to behave for us to love them, our walk home
can be surprisingly simple. We have enormous power not to manipulate
the world, but to be happy and to know peace.

Hugh Prather