Quotes about happiness

Happiness is a myth, which was invented to make us buy things.

"Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you." pg 13

"Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere." Page 12

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You can not protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into. (p. 71)

I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. (p. 17)

Brod’s life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo,mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily … None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don’t love you.

The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.

The primary, or earliest, class of human pleasure is the pleasures of external senses.

In addition to these, man is susceptible of certain secondary pleasures, as the pleasures of intellectual feeling, the pleasures of sympathy, and the pleasures of self-approbation.

The secondary pleasures are probably more exquisite than the primary;

Or, at least,

The most desirable state of man is that in which he has access to all these sources of pleasure, and is in possession of a happiness the most varied and uninterrupted.

This state is a state of high civilization.

The pleasures of self-approbation, together with the right cultivation of all our pleasures, require individual independence. Without independence men cannot become either wise, or useful, or happy.

Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.

To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline — training — is about.

In your dark workshop, let the sun shine on other men! Even our dull life has its own pride, its own happiness!