Defining Happiness Quotes

Just as eunuchs will never know aesthetics as applied to the selection of beautiful women, so neither will pure rationalists ever know ethics, nor will they ever succeed in defining happiness, for happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned or defined. ~ Miguel

To experience true joy, is to desist from defining happiness through the lens of capitalism ~ Malebo Sephodi

Happiness comes the way the wind blows. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

All people should know that the principal business in life is to seek happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Happy is he who can give himself up. ~ Naguib Mahfouz

Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness ... We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. ~ John Dickinson

Every act of kindness is a seed of success. ~ Walter E. Jacobson

Family means true happiness. Stay loyal to your true happiness. ~ Avijeet Das

It is not the fame, not the flesh, not the money. We want something else, something pretty. ~ Debasish Mridha

He believed that life gives us all a few moments of happiness. For some they last hours or days, for a few lucky ones they last for years. The memories from those moments stays with us forever and turns into a country of memory to which we try to go back for the rest of our lives without ever being able to ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It is not the duration but the donation for the humanity that determines the value of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Grief - Happiness is to feel that one's soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them. ~ Joseph Joubert

Life isn't the orderly black-and-white business we'd prefer it to be. It's messy and complicated and horribly blurred around the edges. All we can ever do is make the best of it. And maybe grab at those fleeting chances of happiness.' 'But never at the expense of anyone else's ~ Erica James

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman. ~ Marina Anderson

The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the "world well lost." Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Love is not something we must try hard to do, love comes naturally, it is trusting that love is enough - That is the hard thing to do. It sounds simple, but even when the simple answer is right in front of us, since the feeling is complicated, we often pass up the right answer to look for a complicated answer to match it.
In the 1300s somewhere between seventy-five and two-hundred million people died from the black plague, which was a bacteria carried by fleas. Fleas are not a new problem, and the cure has been widely known long before the 1300s. It was simply to shave your hair off, wear clothes made from something coarse like goat hair, and to cover your skin in ash. The fleas lay eggs that stick to our hair, and with the hair gone, there is nowhere for the eggs to stick. The ash has the chemical hydroxide, which is enough to make the skin unlivable for the fleas.
Everyone knew that anyone with a shaved head and ash on their skin meant that they knew they had fleas. To avoid the shame, many people would rather put up with the fleas, as long as other people didn't think they had them. Maybe the quote before Mark Twain coined his was, "It's better to keep your hair and appear free from fleas than shave your head and remove all doubt."
Besides itching and inflammation, fleas were fine… sort of… that is, until those fleas got infected with the plague, and spread that deadly infection. Instead of shaving their heads, people tried any other thing, and about half o ~ Michael Brent Jones

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves. ~ Andrew Delbanco

Let go of your constant strife to sustain and assert the idea of who you are. It is this massive effort of defining your identity that keeps you wedged in the chronic routine of comparisons and conflicts with whoever and whatever appears to threaten this idea. If you have tried to assert yourself for many years and you have accomplished nothing, then be honest and do something different. Just be nothing. Try it for one day. Release your idea of being yourself, and just be nothing, be the void. And as you are being nothing you may realise that you can be all that is ~ Franco Santoro

When our founding fathers put their signatures on the Declaration of Independence, those 56 brave people, most of whom by the way were clergymen, they said that we had certain inalienable rights given to us by our creator, and among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life being one of them. I still believe that. ~ Mike Huckabee

What a betrayal of life, of sense, to choose hate over love, despair over happiness. ~ Marty Rubin

In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people. ~ Marquis De Custine

In some way, everyone is your son or daughter, so without judging them, love everyone. ~ Debasish Mridha

Only bad things happen quickly, ... Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life's primary virtues. ~ Gordon Livingston

The power of procreation is not an incidental part of the plan; it is the plan of happiness. ~ Boyd K. Packer

Happiness is not about getting what you want--it is about wanting what you've got. ~ Michael Brodeur

It's hard to say. Sometimes people have had terrible childhoods. And sometimes they just haven't found their special place in life. And sometimes they're dogs from hell and must be destroyed. ~ Charles Addams

Everything is so superb and breathtaking. I am creeping forward on my belly like they do in war movies. ~ Diane Arbus

Our life, we realize, is not as happy as we have been taught to think. ~ Yiyun Li

Pain that you fear becomes present if you dare. ~ Debasish Mridha

Perhaps when you helped someone to achieve happiness that you yourself would no longer experience, you also gained a small piece of that happiness. ~ Yoav Blum

It's risky to stake your happiness and your sense of self on something you can easily lose. ~ Dean Cole

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available - more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don't have to run into the future in order to get more. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

You know, when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up, and our hearts break in two."

Ted Brautigan, Hearts in Atlantis ~ Deyth Banger

No one has arrived. Leave me there
as you would leave a myth with any person who sees you
until he cries and rushes into himself, afraid of happiness. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

You are a creature meant to be free. Almost always, the person hardest to tell the truth to ... is you. Once you can be honest with yourself, you'll find the strength and desire to be honest with others. It's the most freeing feeling imaginable. Go find a mirror and face yourself and your darkest truths. You have the light within you to chase away the dark demons that hold you down and push you back into the black corners of your past. You deserve better. You are a child of light and light hidden behind dark clouds, does nothing to brighten the world. ~ Toni Sorenson

I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Stay close to those who sing, tell stories, and enjoy life, and whose eyes sparkle with happiness. Because happiness is contagious and will always manage to find a solution, whereas logic can find only an explanation for the mistake made. ~ Paulo Coelho

Loneliness remembers what happiness forgets ~ Hal David

Come along,' she said. 'They're waiting.'
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked-he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, 'She will marry that man,' dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa. ~ Virginia Woolf

For every minute you are wasting, you are losing 60 seconds of your life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Our thinking minds deprive us of the happiness that comes when we are living fully in the moment. ~ Ram Dass