QUOTES ON HAPPINESS I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the DesPlaines River And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion. --Carl Sandburg Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery. —H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. --Joseph Addison I am 100% responsible for my own happiness. It is a state of mind cultivated by my choices and habits, not by things or people. Yes, my children make me happy. Yes, sitting at the beach and watching a sunset makes me happy. But I don’t ever want to make the mistake of thinking my happiness is dependent on something—a different job, more money, another child, wood floors, a remodeled bathroom. --Kelle Hampton We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. --George Bernard Shaw There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. —Ben Williams - 1! - The happy people are those who are producing something; the bored people are those who are consuming much and producing nothing. --Dean W. R. Inge The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past. --André Maurois I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles. —Audrey Hepburn The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude. --Voltaire Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind. --John Stuart Mill There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. --George Sand Some pursue happiness—others create it. --Ralph Waldo Emerson A laugh is a smile that bursts. --Mary H. Waldrip The young man who wants to marry happily should pick out a good mother and marry one of her daughters—any one will do. --J. Ogden Armour Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe. --Orison Swett Marden Such short little lives our pets have to spend with us, and they spend most of it waiting for us to come home each day. It is amazing how much love and laughter they bring into our lives and even how much closer we become with each other because of them. --John Grogan - 2! - People who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. —Neil Gaiman Comparison is the thief of joy. —Theodore Roosevelt Unless each day can be looked back upon by an individual as one in which he has had some fun, some joy, some real satisfaction, that day is a loss. —Dwight D Eisenhower You can’t be sad or cynical watching ‘Singin’ in the Rain.’ I dare you to try. Those rich Technicolor hues; those dashing jawlines and cherubic smiles; the wry choreography; those soigné dyed-fox gowns and drop-waist, fringed flapper skirts; the goofball slapstick; those infectious show tunes, sung with bouncing trills and bright vibrato: They will alway buck you up, with or without your consent. —Catherine Rampell Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die. —François Truffaut When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. —John Lennon This sense of being at home is important to everyone’s well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease... Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you... Home is the one place in the world. .. where you belong.... Coming home is your major restorative in life. These are formidably good things, which you cannot get merely by finding true love or getting married or having children or landing the best job in the world––or even by moving into the house of your dreams. --Sandra Tsing Loh - 3! - Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation— what are they? They are the happiest people in the world. --William Lyon Phelps Being a student at university, I can’t afford adopting a pet form the shelter. Instead I buy plants nobody else wants from the store that are probably going to die and plant them on my terrace. Then I imagine they are happy to be alive and that makes me happy, too. —Internet Meme Don’t let the darkness from your past block the light of joy in your present. What happened is done. Stop giving time to things which no longer exist, when there is so much joy to be found here and now. —Karen Salmansohn In the last months of her life, my mother-in-law dwelled in a hospital bed in our house. It took all of her strength to get down our steps, walk around the block, and get back to the front door. As we inched down the sidewalk, she pointed out every flower, the pattern in paving stones, the various shades of the trees and bushes. I had never seen my neighborhood like this. At first, I was infuriated by our pace. She would stop often, not because she was short of breath, but to examine the texture of a flower. It’s hard to give ourselves even 15 minutes of the day. It means overcoming the nagging distraction of our many pressures and aims. My mother-in- law reminded me of the patient momentum of looking and really seeing, turning an ordinary walk into gladness for continuing to be among the living. --Wendy Lustbader The greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. The more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. —Tenzin Gyatso There is room in the smallest cottage for a happy loving pair. —Friedrich Schiller Life is like a big red apple...only by taking a bite of it can I enjoy it’s crisp, juicy sweetness. An apple can’t be enjoyed to it’s fullest by sitting and watching it. —Unknown - 4! - No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy. --Thomas Fuller From the latter weeks of October to Christmas-eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness is in season, which, in my judgment, enters the room with the tea- tray. —Thomas De Quincey I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy. --Nikki Giovanni I have lived to know that the great secret of happiness is this: never suffer your energies to stagnate. The old adage of too many irons in the fire, conveys an abominable lie. You cannot have too many – poker, tongs and all – keep them all going. —Adam Clarke The more people eat fruit or veggies, the higher they score on tests of happiness, a study showed. Eating up to eight produce servings a day has the same impact as going from unemployed to employed. —AARP Magazine The purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind. --Joseph Conrad Don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers. Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul. —Mario Quintana 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. —C. G. Jung - 5! - Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. —Samuel Johnson One’s work usually occupies more than half of one’s waking life. Choosing work that does not bring happiness will lead to a life that is mostly disappointing. --Bo Bennett My unhappy reactions to Facebook may be more universal than I had realized. When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dogsledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable.