I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.
— Much Ado About Nothing
Quotes About Happiness
Voltaire treated happiness as a decision with practical benefits: he decided to be happy because it was good for his health. Lao Tzu warned against chasing it, advising readers to seek not happiness too greedily and not to fear unhappiness. Freud was bleaker, writing that the intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
Plato and Einstein both tied happiness to other people. Caring about the happiness of others, Plato wrote, we find our own, and Einstein said our happiness depends on the smiles and well-being of those around us. Kafka saw how fragile contentment can feel, asking what would happen if all the peace and comfort came to a horrible end. Mozart placed it beyond this life, thanking God for the chance to learn that death is the key to true happiness. Dickens gives the strangest version: a man who never had one hour's happiness in a woman's company, yet spent every day thinking about the happiness of having her near.
Plato and Einstein both tied happiness to other people. Caring about the happiness of others, Plato wrote, we find our own, and Einstein said our happiness depends on the smiles and well-being of those around us. Kafka saw how fragile contentment can feel, asking what would happen if all the peace and comfort came to a horrible end. Mozart placed it beyond this life, thanking God for the chance to learn that death is the key to true happiness. Dickens gives the strangest version: a man who never had one hour's happiness in a woman's company, yet spent every day thinking about the happiness of having her near.
The proper basis for marriage is mutual misunderstanding. The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. One should always be in love - that's the reason one should never marry.
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories
Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.
— On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
— Notebook
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
— Jacob's Room
I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.
— Pride and Prejudice
My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?
— White Nights
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
— Les Misérables
I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.
— Great Expectations
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
— The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.
— Anna Karenina
... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.
— Swann's Way
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
— The Conquest of Happiness
People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
— A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition
What good is money if it can't buy happiness?
— The Man in the Brown Suit
I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.
— Steppenwolf
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.
— The Nicomachean Ethics
In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.
— Parerga and Paralipomena
One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.
— Love in the Time of Cholera
A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.
— Berenice
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them inpractical fashion.
— The Man in the Arena: Selected Writings
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
— The Count of Monte Cristo
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
— The Art of Happiness