100 positive quotes about happiness "The pursuit of happiness"

Image: Happiness quotes illustration / Positive Thesaurus

100 inspiring happiness quotes

01. Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.
William Feather

02. It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.
Charles Spurgeon

03. I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.
Martha Washington

04. There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.
George Sand

05. Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

06. Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
Dalai Lama

07. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam

08. Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman

09. True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

10. Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.
William Feather

11. Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.
Jacques Prévert

12. If you want to be happy, be.
Leo Tolstoy

13. Happiness is never stopping to think if you are.
Palmer Sondreal

14. Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.
Robert Anthony

15. Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

16. Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.
E.L. Konigsburg

17. Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy. Cynthia Nelms

18. Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.
Norm Papernick

19. I don't think you can feel a sense of entitlement and still be happy. Happiness always comes from feeling that you've been blessed.
Robert Brault

20. Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

21. What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
Colette

22. The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
James Openheim

23. Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
John Barrymore

24. "Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.
A.A. Milne

25. People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.
H. Jackson Brown

26. Happiness and sadness run parallel to each other. When one takes a rest, the other one tends to take up the slack.
Hazelmarie Elliott

27. Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
Margaret Young

28. Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
St. Augustine

29. Pleasure is spread through the earth. In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
William Wordsworth

30. Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln

31. Happiness is a form of courage.
Holbrook Jackson

32. We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
Jean de La Bruyere

33. 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

34. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
Berke Breathed

35. The secret to happiness is to put the burden of proof on unhappiness.
Robert Brault

36. Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
Eleanor Roosevelt

37. Happiness is a direction, not a place.
Sydney J. Harris

38. The really happy person is the one who can enjoy the scenery, even when they have to take a detour.
James Hopwood Jeans

39. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama

40. Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower.
John Harrigan

41. There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
Lady Blessington

42. The best vitamin to be a happy person is B1.
Unknown

43. A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness.
Bernard de Fontenelle

44. Is it not clear, however, that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of the fraction called happiness?
Yevgeny Zamyatin

45. A happy thought is like a seed that sows positivity for all to reap.
Miriam Muhammad

46. Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
Immanuel Kant

47. Filling your heart with happiness is more profitable than filling your hands with riches.
Astrid Alauda

48. Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
Sigmund Freud

49. The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw

50. Some pursue happiness, others create it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image: Happiness quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero - / Positive Thesaurus

51. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.
W. Beran Wolfe

52. If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Bertrand Russell

53. The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
Doug Larson

54. I think the key to life is just being a happy person, and happiness will bring you success.
Diego Val

55. There is no way to happiness — happiness is the way.
Thich Nhat Hanh

56. 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

57. 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

58. I have only two kinds of days: happy and hysterically happy.
Allen J. Lefferdink

59. So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.
Booth Tarkington

60. We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton

61. Happiness is a way station between too little and too much. Channing Pollock

62. The happy have whole days, and those they choose. The unhappy have but hours, and those they lose.
Colley Cibber

63. The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.
Charles L. Morgan

64. Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
Iris Murdoch

65. Happiness is... usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
Thomas Szasz

66. You cannot always have happiness, but you can always give happiness.
Alyson Noel

67. Doing cartwheels in the green grass of happiness and skipping high towards the blue heavenly skies of joy!
Terri Guillemets

68. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw

69. Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.
Colette

70. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan

71. People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
Anton Chekhov

72. Happiness is an inside job.
William Arthur Ward

73. Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens.
Douglas Jerrold

74. The fact is always obvious much too late, but the most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid.
J.D. Salinger

75. If a person’s basic state of mind is serene and calm, then it is possible for this inner peace to overwhelm a painful physical experience. On the other hand, if someone is suffering from depression, anxiety, or any form of emotional distress, then even if he or she happens to be enjoying physical comforts, he will not really be able to experience the happiness that these could bring.
Tenzin Gyatso ()14th Dalai Lama)

76. Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
Werner Erhard

77. 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

78. Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though it were his own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

79. When you’re really happy, the birds chirp and the sun shines even on cold dark winter nights — and flowers will bloom on a barren land.
Terri Guillemets

80. Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Joseph Addison

81. There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
Freya Stark

82. On the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
William R. Inge

83. To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus

84. Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

85. 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

86. Happiness is like the penny candy of our youth: we got a lot more for our money back when we had no money.
Mignon McLaughlin

87. No matter how carefully you plan your life, in the end your happiness comes down to someone who one day just walked into it.
Robert Brault

88. One day you just say "To heck with it," and you go looking for trouble, and you find happiness.
Robert Brault

89. Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
Hosea Ballou

90. I don't think most people want to be unhappy. It's just something they've gotten good at.
Robert Brault

91. Happiness pulses with every beat of my heart.
Terri Guillemets

92. Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.
Benjamin Franklin

93. The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus

94. Gather the crumbs of happiness and they will make you a loaf of contentment.
Unknown Author

95. 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

96. Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
Phillips Brooks

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

98. You need to learn to be happy by nature, because you’ll seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance.
Lavetta Sue Wegman

99. The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life...
William Morris

100. Be virtuous and you'll be happy? Nonsense! Be happy and you'll begin to be virtuous.
James Gould Cozzens


ps. See also words that can be used to describe happiness here.

Image: Happiness quote by Mignon McLaughlin / Positive Thesaurus