Happiness and Misery

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

Jean Paul Richter, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.

Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book, in Happiness and Misery

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

Expect everything, and anything seems nothing. Expect nothing, and anything seems everything.

Samuel Hazo, in Happiness and Misery

Learn from the past. Look to the future. Live in the present.

Steve Henthorn, in Happiness and Misery

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Aristotle, in Happiness and Misery

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

Aesop, in Happiness and Misery and Success and Failure

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon, in Happiness and Misery

Harmony seldom makes a headline.

Silas Bent, in Happiness and Misery

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

Ingrid Bergman, in Happiness and Misery

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi, in Happiness and Misery

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.

Samuel Goldwyn, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Anaïs Nin, in Happiness and Misery and Wisdom and Ignorance

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.

John Stuart Mill, in Happiness and Misery

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Henry Louis Mencken, in Happiness and Misery

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant, in Happiness and Misery

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

D. H. Lawrence, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, in Happiness and Misery

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery