Search For Happiness Quotes

I don't believe in happiness anyway ... it's too much of an American pastime, this search for happiness. Just forget happiness and enjoy your misery. ~ Frank McCourt

My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender. ~ Fernando Pessoa

A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule. ~ Scott Adams

Only the shallowest person believes that they can attain true happiness by maximizing their wealth at any cost. In absence of morality, ethics, and a sustainable philosophy to guide us in an ethical search for happiness, we will always perceive life's random countervailing forces of adversity and unpleasantness as inflicting a great personal injustice upon us. Through application of a deeply embedded personal philosophy, we can push back against the negative implications of a life of suffering. We can use a philosophical stance to gain the perspective needed to say 'yes' to all of life, both its rosy path of ineffable joys and a blackened trail of tears. We must learn to accept life as it truly is and not waste precious time in wistfulness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We can continue our quest for improvement or not. We can search for happiness, enlightenment, security or identity or not. The search is not wrong; it is unrelated to the actual world. ~ Steven Harrison

We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure
your perfection
is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The search for happiness is purely personal and not a model we can give to others. ~ Paulo Coelho

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardur and paradoxes - than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. ~ Alain De Botton

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Many search for happiness as we look for a hate we wear on our heads. ~ Nikolaus Lenau

If you search for happiness does not take into consideration others that care about you, eventually, you will end up empty-handed... ~ Jose N Harris

The secret to happiness is elusive because it is a paradoxical truth. To gain happiness, you must first cease pursuing it. Things perceived to provide happiness are like shiny, pretty bubbles that lure us this way and that way, chasing after their glossy buoyancy. But once they are handled, they "pop" - empty - vanishing along with the hope that happiness could ever be captured. Happiness cannot be caught or won or purchased or even handled. Happiness simply forms like a rainbow in the kindest and most grateful hearts. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

This search for happiness can knock us out of sync with God. As the life of Jesus makes clear, keeping in sync with God is about obedience. Any other pursuit will get in the way. ~ Franklin Graham

The roots of addiction can be seen in our search for happiness in something outside of our self, be it drugs, relationships, material possessions. ~ Lee L Jampolsky

Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being. ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The more you strive and search for happiness, the more you overlook the possibility that it is here already. ~ Robert Holden

It is not a sin to be happy. Half a dozen exercises and an attentive ear are enough to allow us to realize our most impossible dreams. Because of my pride in wisdom, you made me walk the Road that every person can walk, and discover what everyone else already knows if they have paid the slightest attention to life. You made me see that the search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others.
... I have walked to many miles to discover things I already knew, things that all of us know but that are so hard to accept. Is there anything harder for us ... than discovering that we can achieve the power? ... Few can accept the burden of their own victory: most give up their dreams when they see that they can be realized. They refuse to fight the good fight because they do not know what to do with their own happiness; they are imprisoned by the things of the world. ~ Paulo Coelho

My search for happiness ends at your Smiling Face because I know, nothing else in the world can make me Happier. ~ Anmol Rawat

The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The search for happiness is one of the few actions in which human beings absolutely agree upon, though they may not agree on what it implies or how to find it. This quest for satisfaction emphasizes the creation of physical and mental boundaries that we would like to "privatize" for our welfare and security, trying to keep them unchanged in appearance and actions. That quest is ultimately insatiable and eventually results in more suffering and dissatisfaction ~ Ivan Figueroa-Otero

Sex is not a subject in my photographs, or would only be if it had to do with romance, sometimes vulnerability. The photographs are quite clearly about happiness, or search for happiness. ~ Hedi Slimane

All addictions are primitive and negative manifestations of a person's deeper needs. They are a sign that the person longs for a soul connection and an everlasting bliss. ~ Pulkit Sharma

On that search for happiness we did nothing with all those other emotions that made us human. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

William Butler Yeats's "Second Coming" seems perfectly to render our present predicament: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. "The best" are no longer able to fully engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.
However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists.
It is here that Yeats's diagnosis falls short ~ Slavoj Zizek

This is why I belong, and why I believe. I commend to all this same search for happiness and for the truth. ~ Clayton Christensen

We all have direct experience with things that do or don't make us happy, we all have friends, therapists, cabdrivers, and talk-show hosts who tell us about things that will or won't make us happy, and yet, despite all this practice and all this coaching, our search for happiness often culminates in a stinky mess. We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn't and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won't. ~ Daniel Gilbert

More young people are volunteering than ever before. More people are including service to others on their busy lives' to do list. The promise of America is embedded deep in our DNA, calling us to a much less shallow search for happiness and meaning. ~ Arianna Huffington

Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end. ~ Bob Marley

What unites us is our despair. Do other people wish to know that someone else walked this earth with a similar batch of questions and frustration? Am I alone trussed with a long suppressed scream lodged within my breast shouting out in the vacant darkness of night, "Who am I, where am I, and where shall I go with this dreaded case of hopelessness, self-doubt, and self-loathing that is weighing me down, making me crazy, and blindsiding any chance to discover personal happiness?" On many occasions, I felt like surrendering to life, no longer willing to endure the physical aches and devastating emotional blows that human life requires. Lost, exiled, and living in alienation from the entire world I searched for a reentry port to a meaningful life. I must work; honest toil is good for the body, mind, and spiritual health of human beings. I shall go to the grave utterly spent from living an authentic life of giving the better part of oneself to the world. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes. ~ Alain De Botton

Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western Islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and being (partially, at least) responsible for the fatwa condemning him to death, and so on. The result of such stances is what one should expect in such cases: the more the Western liberal Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. [T]his constellation perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. What this implies is that terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, are not really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term--what they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, in ~ Slavoj Zizek

Why should the search for happiness be only or essentially material and mental? Aren't there untold riches too in the moral, the sentimental and the spiritual realms? ~ Robert Muller

Don't give up the search for happiness because you're afraid of getting hurt. ~ Martha Raye

A solution exists for every challenge to our peace of mind. There is always a way, somehow. What holds us back from happiness is our lack of faith in the mighty power of the Holy Spirit to address our most humble needs. ~ Harold Klemp

Those who want to start a new journey, there are always new roads open for you ~ Aida Mitsu

automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, ~ Daniel Kahneman

If you want to be happy you have to work to make it happen. You can't just wish for it and you can't put it in the hands of other people. ~ Michael Buckley

But this whole idea of marrying for happiness and love is relatively new. For ~ Aziz Ansari

I mean, I understand that because they're disadvantaged that they deserve their own parking spots, but do they have to make them so wide? I never understood how these people were allowed to drive cars but they get these really neat chairs with wheels and they're still not happy, so instead of parking their wheelchairs in the designated spots, they upstage us normal people and get the best parking spots with vehicles that are clearly too sophisticated for them to be handling. Still, you should smile at a cripple, because it's the only bit of happiness they'll ever have. ~ Zach Braff

He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window. ~ Margo Lanagan

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project. ~ Catherine Hardwicke

The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph. ~ Hermann Hesse

There are two ways of being happy: We may either diminish our wants or augment our means- either will do- the result in the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest. If you are idle or sick or poor, however hard it may be to diminish your wants, it will be harder to augment your means. If you are active and prosperous or young and in good health, it may be easier for you to augment your means than to diminish your wants. But if you are wise, you will do both at the same time, young or old, rich or poor, sick or well; and if you are very wise you will do both in such a way as to augment the general happiness of society. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Why is it so? If live is a gift, all that belongs to and is intrinsic to life is going to be a gift. You can wait for it, you can be receptive to it, you can remain in a surrendered mood, waiting, patient, but you cannot demand, and you cannot force. ~ Rajneesh

Sitting alone with Jean, Avery felt for the first time that he was part of the world, engaged in the same simple happiness that was known to so many and was so miraculous. He wanted to know everything; he did not mean this carelessly. He wanted to know the child and the schoolgirl, what she'd believed in and what she'd loved, what she'd worn and what she'd read
no detail was too small or insignificant
so that when at last he touched her, his hands would have this intelligence. ~ Anne Michaels

Concentration is not thinking of one thing. On the contrary, it is excluding all thoughts, since all thoughts obstruct the sense of one's true being. All efforts are to be directed simply to removing the veil of ignorance. Concentrating the mind solely on the Self will lead to happiness or bliss. Drawing in the thoughts, restraining them and preventing them from straying outwards is called detachment (vairagya). Fixing them in the Self is spiritual practice (sadhana). Concentrating on the heart is the same as concentrating on the Self. Heart is another name for Self. ~ Ramana Maharshi

I don't know who you are; you could be an axe murderer for all I know. How am I supposed to trust you and follow you? For that matter, follow you where?" Gabe inquired.
"Search yourself, what do your instincts tell you?" Uri asked.
"That you're a crazy nut job and freaking me out!" Gabe snapped back. ~ Wendy Owens

There is a difference between the stuff that people put online themselves, like pictures and their trips and flights and meals they've eaten, than the stuff that they don't realize is also going into foreign computers. Like, for example, copies of your emails or every single online search you ever do, 'cause all that is being recorded as well. ~ Mikko Hypponen

Love gives us happiness, peace then it gives us a lot of pain and you also have to sacrifice your happiness, then you began to hate that person, so fall for friendships. Respect each other's space and styles, then hangout and enjoy ~ Shaikh Ashraf

There is no "scientific worldview" just as there is no uniform enterprise "science"- except in the minds of metaphysicians, school masters, and scientists blinded by the achievements of their own particular niche ... There is no objective principle that could direct us away from the supermarket "religion" or the supermarket "art" toward the more modern, and much more expensive supermarket "science." Besides, the search for such guidance would be in conflict with the idea of individual responsibility which allegedly is an important ingredient of a "rational" or scientific age. ~ Paul Feyerabend

Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn't that image spellbinding? For someone who loves books, what greater happiness could there be? ~ Marie Kondo

I passed people shopping or walking their dogs, and young people, university students maybe, busy about their lives, so that the streets I walked seems vibrant to me, more vibrant than my own. But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was. ~ Garth Greenwell

His gut was stitched up good and tight, but that didn't prevent it from flopping. He wiped his damp palms on the legs of his jeans and stood up shakily, leaning heavily on his cane.
He called himself a masochist for putting himself through this torture day after day.
He braced himself for the disappointment of having to go home alone.
He braced himself for happiness like he'd never known in his entire life.
He watched the door they would come through. ~ Sandra Brown

Let us find the way to the peace
Le us make peace, the way of life
Let us sing the song of peace
Let us dance together with joy of life
Let us feel and love each other
Let us share and bloom together
Let us dare to care for who suffer
Let us dream a peaceful earth forever. ~ Debasish Mridha

Love is for life.
Life is for love.
Without love there is no life.
Without life love is not alive. ~ Debasish Mridha

Man's happiness today consists in "having fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies - all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones - and the eternally disappointed ones. ~ Erich Fromm

Ian...paused for a moment on the threshold and stared, overcome by a sudden sense of confronting, not the men and women who were his friends, but a gathering of souls. How strange we are to one another, he thought. Each soul was encased in flesh, bound by an envelope of skin, turned inward, immersed in silence. The soul was light, or flame--its heat small, ephemeral, easily extinguished. Ian stared and felt afraid: yet felt, in that instant, an uncanny happiness. He saw himself so brotherly, so deeply kindred to them all--these souls, these separate beings, whom he did not know. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

You only get one life. And before you know it, it'll be over. You'll go to sleep one day in your twenties, then wake up in your fifties. The purpose of life isn't to sit around waiting for something to happen on a wing and prayer; you have to make it happen. You can spend your whole life searching for unsolved mysteries or waiting for someone to fall in love with you, but at the end of your life you'll realize you've wasted your time. You've missed all of the beauty in the world in search of a vague dream or an answer to a question that has none. The purpose of life isn't to wait for things to fall into your lap. The purpose of life is to live. ~ Brent Saltzman

Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us. ~ Helen Keller

Statistics show that well over half the married couples in our culture divorce, and many of those who stick it out do so for reasons other than personal happiness - because it's such a hassle dividing everything, moving, having to start over - not to mention children and the emotional and financial aspects of splitting up. ~ Caroline Muir

What is a scientist? ... We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself. ~ Maria Montessori

Tim turned around, and took a few steps away from her. It was as though a lever had been pulled that activated several mixtures of emotions that left him in a bizarre land searching through a wide forest for a particular tree that had an emergency shade of peace. He turned back around, and stood with his hands in his pockets. An empty bucket of happiness had been dumped out on the road of his burst bubble, and left him longing for the substance of a smile. ~ Calvin W. Allison

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity ~ Carl Sagan

At a minimum the majority of search dollars will flow to a social media model because people care most about what their peers think and the technology is there for that information to be quickly shared on products and services. ~ Erik Qualman

Happiness: We rarely feel it. I would buy it, beg it, steal it, Pay in coins of dripping blood For this one transcendent good. ~ Amy Lowell

Was it courage that made her take the last step, or weakness? Was it loss that walked her to the edge, or a search for freedom? ~ Scot Gardner

He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop-I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed-he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, and which I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging. ~ Diane Setterfield

Why aren't you happy? they tend to focus on their current circumstances. Happy people look to Someone so big that by his grace, even great difficulties provide opportunities for a deeper kind of happiness. ~ Randy Alcorn

Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others. ~ E. M. Forster

Will you dance with me?" The charms on Sahara's bracelet clinked against one another as she lifted her arms to link them around his neck, her love for him proud and open.
Deep inside, even the part of him that was the void, merciless and dark and broken, knew happiness, knew joy. ~ Nalini Singh

Unicorn. Old french, unicorne. Latin ūnicornis. Literally one horned. Unus one and cornu a horn. A fabulous animal resembling a horse with one horn. Visible only to those who search and trust and generally mistaken for a white mare. Unicorn. ~ The Wise Butterfly

A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones. ~ Ellen Key

Today is a YES day. Say YES to stepping onto that plane, train, or climbing onto the back of a Harley. Say YES to adventure, which comes like a comet across the sky. Say YES to hoping all the signs are positive ahead. Say YES to being the person you've always wanted to be. Say YES to cleaning up your house. Say YES to trying on that smaller size dress. (and fitting in it - whoopee) Say YES to yourself for a change. Say YES, because NO is always at close range." - A.H. Scott 12/10/11 ~ A.H. Scott

Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives. ~ Matthew Syed

We can't be so desperate for love that we forget where we can always find it; within. ~ Alexandra Elle

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects. ~ Jack McDevitt

I wanted to live. For the father and brother who I never knew and for my mother who was cheated of a life of happiness. I wanted to live for them. And I wanted to live for me. ~ Abbi Glines

My cousin, Rip Torn, persuaded me not to change my name. You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success. ~ Sissy Spacek