Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.
Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.
I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what itβs like to feel absolutely worthless and they donβt want anyone else to feel like that.
Γ, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.
I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it.
I shall take the heart. [...] For brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.
The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit.
I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. Iβm not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though Iβm not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?
dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.
In the end, the number of prayers we say may contribute to our happiness, but the number of prayers we answer may be of even greater importance.
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.
Having a low opinion of yourself is not 'modesty.' It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not 'egotism.' It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.
