Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.
What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday's or tomorrow's.
I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.
Contempt is the only asymmetrical expression in the muscular facial system: Disgust, fear, happiness, surprise and anger typically express themselves symmetrically. Contempt is marked by one lip corner pulled up and in a dismissive sneer.
I've learned that men and women who are living wholehearted lives really allow themselves to soften into joy and happiness. They allow themselves to experience it.
Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.
Happiness is not something you achieve. It's not something you do or someplace you get to. Happiness is something you inhabit.
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
Having a loving relationship with our spouse or with our children is what leads to the long-term happiness we all seek.
Ladies of Fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride.
Happiness depends more on how life strikes you than on what happens.
Those who submit like a child do it because they know that the Father wants only the happiness of His children and that only He knows the way. That is the testimony we must have to keep praying like a submissive child, in the good times as well as the times of trouble.
It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
I've realized through the years that I just find happiness in other things, whether it's my dogs or my friends or, like, looking at the sunset. So if I were to wish for something else, it would just to be happy all the time, to have a superpower of not letting things affect me, and to be true to who I am, always.
If my life has had a theme, I suppose it has been a typical American theme in that, for most of it, I have been looking for happiness and success.
There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.
Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.
I'm sure, ever since I was really young, that happiness is not a bottle of champagne and a girl and a limousine and a swimming pool.
