Human Happiness Quotes

We're nothing but human.
The way of life can be free and beautiful.
But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls – has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
We think too much and feel too little.
More than machinery we need humanity.
More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
Don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.
You are not machines.
You are not cattle.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts.
In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
We all want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery.
We don't want to hate and despise one another.
We all want to help one another, human beings are like that.
You the people have the power.. the power to create machines.. the power to create happiness.
You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful..
To make this life a wonderful adventure.
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices.
Some are on a grand scale.. Most of these choices are on lesser points.
But we define ourselves by the choices we have made.
We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices.
Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly.
Human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design ~ Anonymous

The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the former by inculcating the practice of the latter. ~ George Washington

The leading error of the human mind, - the bane of human happiness - the perverter of human virtue ... is Religion - that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion - that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion - that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion - that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world! ~ Frances Wright

The end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It is okay to be flawed and defective, or even wonderful ~ David D. Burns

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

Law students are famous for busting their buns to make high grades, sometimes at the expense of health and relationships, thinking, 'Later I'll be happy, because the American dream will be mine,' " said Lawrence S. Krieger, a law professor at Florida State University and an author of the study. "Nice, except it doesn't work." The problem with the more prestigious jobs, said Mr. Krieger, is that they do not provide feelings of competence, autonomy or connection to others - three pillars of self-determination theory, the psychological model of human happiness on which the study was based. Public-service jobs do. ~ Anonymous

Now the goodness that we have to consider is clearly human goodness, since the good or happiness which we set out to seek was human good and human happiness. But human goodness means in our view excellence of soul, not excellence of body; ~ Aristotle.

But as human happiness is of a very short duration, so in those days were human fashions upon which it entirely depends. ~ Jonathan Swift

Prejudices of any kind are the destroyers of human happiness & welfare. ~ Abdu'l- Baha

Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer. ~ Dalai Lama

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked. ~ William Edward Hartpole Lecky

All human happiness and misery take the form of action. ~ Aristotle.

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status. Bluntly ~ Sebastian Junger

There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness. ~ Lin Yutang

In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means "well-daemoned" - that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~ John Lubbock

Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human- in not having to be just happy or just sad- in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I shall therefore discourse equally of both, convinced that human happiness never continues long in one stay. ~ Herodotus

Family life is the source of the greatest human happiness. ~ Robert J. Havighurst

In my mind's eye I can still see the first night flight I made in Argentina. It was pitch-dark. Yet in the black void, I could see the lights of man shining down below on the plains, like faintly luminous earthbound stars. Each star was a beacon signaling the presence of a human mind. Here a man was meditating on human happiness, perhaps, or on justice or peace. Lost among this flock of stars was the star of some solitary shepherd. There, perhaps, a man was in communication with the heavens, as he labored over his calculations of the nebula of Andromeda. And there, a pair of lovers. These fires were burning all over the countryside, and each of them, aven the most humble, had to be fed. The fire of the poet, of the teacher, of the carpenter. But among all these living fires, how many closed windows there were, how many dead stars, fires that gave off no light for lack of nourishment. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period. ~ Max Ernst

The Bourbon King was first ambassador of reason and human happiness. ~ Heinrich Mann

Machines deprive us of two things which are certainly important ingredients of human happiness, namely, spontaneity and variety. ~ Bertrand Russell

Reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness. ~ Rory Sutherland

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. ~ Carl Jung

Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients; action, pleasure and indolence. And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according to the disposition of the person, yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting without destroying in some measure the relish of the whole composition. ~ David Hume

With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness. ~ Epicurus

Our imperfection is the perfect experience of being human. ~ Jennifer White - Strong Heart Awakening

No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness. ~ Elihu Burritt

The advantage of mortality is clear to us, but not to them, and that is why those left behind suffer. They miss the company of their loved ones, but it is the feeling that the deceased no longer exist that hurts the most. This is the cost mortals must pay. Let me put it to you this way: Mortality is better than immortality, but only the immortal have the ability to see this, and there lies both the irony and the cost of human happiness. ~ Eva Pohler

It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption. ~ Anthony Storr

After the most basic physical requirements are satisfied, human happiness is almost independent of wealth. A meaningful job is far more important. ~ Graeme Simsion

It is the height of human happiness to have somebody to love. Our agony is that we have all the light and the paint but no canvas to put the art of our hearts on. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Remember that the expressions and vocal patterns you are committing to film will become synecdoches ... That means something little that stands in for something big. Your smile will stand in for all human happiness. Your tears will be a model for everyone else's sadness.
... You have a responsibility to the people who will repeat your lines, wink your winks, imitate your laughter without knowing they are imitating anything. This is the secret power that actors hold. It is almost like being a god. We create what it is to be human when we stand fifty feet tall on a silk screen.
So you'd better be good at it, for God's sake. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Afterwards, sometimes she dared to remember being in his arms. How, after only clumsy couplings with others, she and this man had straightaway come together as a perfect fit. How they moved together, in effortless synchronicity and with such deep pleasure. How when their exercise left them exhausted, she cried a little, so Vinius wiped her eye with his index finger, murmuring kindly, 'No tears!' before they both fell into profound sleep.
How her troubled mind had drowned in peace, her body melting against his...

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world. ~ Lindsey Davis

Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status. ~ Sebastian Junger

Human. Happiness. Death.
Everything becomes one pale
memory in the flow of time.
Spirit - always want the impossible and feel pain.
Memory - an attempt to find entirety in the endless parody
called human life.
Freedom, policy, power, sex, violence, destruction, war.
All extremes of ego are unconscious rebellion against death and loneliness.
When you realize, the meaning is lost.
I just want to believe:
when I die, I will flying like a bird ... or like dream ... ~ Alexandar Tomov

I consider a good reputation is a great part of the human happiness. Some people, if they are very, very rich can permit themselves certain negligence to their reputations. ~ Aristotle Onassis

There is a gentle element, and man may breathe it with a calm, unruffled soul, and drink its living waters, till his heart is pure; and this is human happiness. ~ Nathaniel Parker Willis

Remember, your relationships have not been designed by God as vehicles for human happiness, but as instruments of redemption. ~ Timothy S. Lane

I am influenced more than ever before by the conviction that social equality is the only basis of human happiness. ~ Nelson Mandela

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure. ~ Samuel Johnson

in pursuit of human happiness we have turned this planet into a bonfire and people aren't even happy ~ Sadhguru

The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting. ~ Theodor Reik

To comprehend the Wisdom of this Injunction the better, and explain the Duty before us, it should be considered, that Government is the only Means by which human Happiness can be attained. ~ Charles Inglis

We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more ~ Woody Allen

Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts. ~ Satish Kumar

You know, a government should be a good thing. The Anglo-Saxons and the Germans rejoice in the phenomenon of government. They think that the recipe for human happiness is that you should make your desires and actions concordant with those of the government. So a German and an American will try to make the government work for him, protect him, and he will be more than happy to murder to preserve that wonderful symbiosis. And if he has some money to invest, he will invest it in the government, buying government bonds. He does this regardless of whether his government happens to be trillions of dollars in debt - that is, practically bankrupt. Despite his rhetoric of private enterprise, a Westerner will invest in his government. And we, Eastern and Central Europeans, and particularly Slavs, we all consider our governments to be absolutely the worst in the world. We are ashamed of our governments, and, as a rule, our government is ashamed of us, trying to improve us statistically, to say that we work more and drink less than we do. We think that there's no greater obstacle to human happiness than the government. So even if we have an institution pregnant with democratic potential, such as workers' self-management, we never even bother to attend a meeting unless absolutely forced. And as for voting, we circle any name without looking at whose it is, out of spite. To a Slav, there is nothing more disgusting than voting. We have an aversion to investing trust in any human being. So h ~ Josip Novakovich

Certainly it is true that the constant striving for something better-the price of progress-adds to the total of human happiness. It stimulates industry by creating new wants. It multiplies opportunities for the employment of brain and brawn. And it bridges the gaps between peaks of prosperity and helps take up the slack during times of reaction. ~ John Willys

She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born. ~ Michael Cunningham

Make-up artists should hereby get the Nobel prize for adding to human happiness. And so should hairdressers. And so should Luke. ~ Sophie Kinsella

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective condition and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvement in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

If there is a secret, a carefully guarded secret, to human happiness, it is that one expressed in a seventeenth-century catechism that says, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." The secret to happiness is found in obedience to God. How can we be happy if we are not obedient? How can we be obedient if we do not know what it is we are to obey? Thus the top and the tail of it is that happiness cannot be fully discovered as long as we remain ignorant of God's Word. ~ R.C. Sproul

Without prosperity the fullness of human happiness is not possible. ~ Sunday Adelaja

School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers. ~ Robert D. Putnam

Human happiness stems from faith in God, from human association, and from a desire to live and let live. ~ Ed Webster

He who always seeks more light the more he finds, and finds more the more he seeks, is one of the few happy mortals who take and give in every point of time. The tide and ebb of giving and receiving is the sum of human happiness, which he alone enjoys who always wishes to acquire new knowledge, and always finds it. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

God loves us toughly enough not to allow us to be happy with our sins. The recollection of sin rightly brings misery of conscience. How else could moral awareness be saved from sentimentality? The deepest human happiness, we learn, is grounded in holiness - God's holy love and our responsive attempts to reflect it fittingly. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Human happiness konsists in having what yu want, and wanting what yu have. ~ Josh Billings

It is the activity of the intellect that constitutes complete human happiness - provided it be granted a complete span of life, for nothing that belongs to happiness can be incomplete. ~ Aristotle.

Only the gods have many destinies and need never die. They are filled with everything and experience everything. Everything - except human happiness. That they can never know and therefore they grudge it to men. Nothing makes them so evil and cruel as that men should presume to be happy and forget them for the sake of their earthly happiness. ~ Par Lagerkvist

All that has been done to weaken the foundation of an implicit faith in the Bible, as a whole, has been at the expense of the sense of religious obligation, and at the cost of human happiness. ~ J.G. Holland

We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be. ~ Thomas Merton

My thoughts about human happiness, for some peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness. ~ Anton Chekhov

Not what we have, but what we use, not what we see, but what we choose, these are the things that mar or bless the sum of human happiness. ~ Joseph Fort Newton

We need to get rid of hate, envy, jealousy, discord in ourselves, so we can reach a solution in terms of peace in order to feel that time has come for human happiness. ~ Chico Xavier

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present. ~ Samuel Johnson

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness. ~ Voltaire

The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating (or inventing) the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The historical figures who earned the honorific "So-and-So the Great" were not great artists, scholars, doctors, or inventors, people who enhanced human happiness or wisdom. They were dictators who conquered large swaths of territory and the people in them. If Hitler's luck had held out a bit longer, he probably would have gone down in history as Adolf the Great. ~ Steven Pinker

It's submission," Rediger murmured. "The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. ~ Michel Houellebecq

I wonder," said Miss Oliver, "if humanity will be any happier because of aeroplanes. It seems to me that the sum of human happiness remains much the same from age to age, no matter how it may vary in distribution, and that all the 'many inventions' neither lessen nor increase it." "After ~ L.M. Montgomery

There is an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be measured in human happiness. ~ Walter Lippmann

They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.
- Gooseberries ~ Anton Chekhov

Hail, wedded love, mysterious law; true source of human happiness. ~ John Milton

We advocate the atheistic philosophy because it is the only clear, consistent position which seems possible to us. As atheists, we simply deny the assumptions of theism; we declare that the God idea, in all its features, is unreasonable and unprovable; we add, more vitally, that the God idea is an interference with the interests of human happiness and progress. We oppose religion not merely as a set of theological ideas; but we must also oppose religion as a political, social and moral influence detrimental to the welfare of humanity. ~ E. Haldeman-Julius

The UNIA teaches our race self-help and self-reliance ... in all those things that contribute to human happiness and well-being. ~ Marcus Garvey

Of all the cankers of human happiness, none corrodes it with so silent, yet so baneful, a tooth, as indolence, ~ Jon Meacham

The enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of poverty and starvation is not the birth of children. It is the failure of people to do with the earth what God could teach them to do if only they would ask and then obey, for they are agents unto themselves. ~ Henry B. Eyring

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one's breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it. ~ John Van Dyke

Truth is the band of union and the basis of human happiness. Without this virtue there is no reliance upon language, no confidence in friendship, no security in promises and oaths. ~ Jeremy Collier

Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness. ~ Bertrand Russell

In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy lying, in which human happiness consists. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false.
All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist.
Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature.
The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave. ~ Gratis P. Spencer

Love and compassion ... are the ultimate source of human happiness, and the need for them lies at the very core of our being. ~ Dalai Lama

We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government. ~ Charles A. Murray

He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortune on the other, who when abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or to far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries of hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all other people envied, that kings had frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty or riches.
He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were so subjected to so many distempers and ~ Daniel Defoe

The origin behind myths and religion is human terror of annihilation. Human societies invented mythology and religion in order to militate against people's fear of living a mortal life. People fear time as a destroyer of human happiness, human beings, and human societies. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What an exciting super-tomorrow it will be! Americans are today making the greatest scientific developments in our history. That is a promise of new levels of employment, industrial activity and human happiness. ~ Clarence Francis

All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action. ~ Aristotle.

Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness. ~ Galen

But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it's better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast. ~ Pete McCarthy

Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness. ~ Herbert Hoover

With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable ... Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer