Quotes about happiness

Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece: the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull.

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant.... Now for most men their pleasures are in conflict with one another because these are not by nature pleasant, but the lovers of what is noble find pleasant the things that are by nature pleasant; and virtuous actions are such... Happiness then is the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world, and these attributes are not severed as in the inscription at Delos: Most noble is that which is justest, and best is health; but pleasantest is it to win what we love.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

I thought that a man must be a fool to sacrifice such good fortune to ambitious plans, slow, difficult, and uncertain of fulfilment, which, even supposing them to be someday realised, in spite of all their brilliancy, were not worth a quarter of an hour of real pleasure and youthful freedom.

Alas, the doors of fortune do not open inward, so that by storming them one can force them open; but they open outward, and therefore nothing can be done.

I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.

Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy—really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensée to mar his enjoyment—without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm. How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer's day, and forever gone from us on the next!

The last time you were happy about nothing; the first time you were afraid about nothing. Which came first? (chapter 12)

Different people have irresolvably different views of the good life — not only at different periods of history and in different forms of society, but even in our own culture at the present time.