We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There is no fulfillment in things whatsoever. And I think one of the reasons that depression reigns supreme amongst the rich and famous is some of them thought that maybe those things would bring them happiness. But what, in fact, does is having a cause, having a passion. And that's really what gives life's true meaning.
Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller 'Self-Help.'
I keep mementos from everything I've done. I've got my cab driver's license from 'Happiness.' I've got a pair of glasses and a belt buckle from playing John Lennon. I've got a pair of sunglasses from playing Andy Warhol... It's all in a box in the garage.
I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.
Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you're doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.
There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
Lucky that man whose children make his happiness in life and not his grief, the anguished disappointment of his hopes.
The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation; it is understanding.
Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness.
True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another's keeping .
A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.
A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend's griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother's happiness.
