When you’re passionate about something, you want it to be all it can be. But in the endgame of life, I fundamentally believe the key to happiness is letting go of that idea of perfection. 2.5K
Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment. 848
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions. 580
People say that money is not the key to happiness, but I always figured if you have enough money, you can have a key made. 1.04K
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them. 1.91K
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. 2.59K
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable. 1.37K
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. 2.63K
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it. 1.46K
I’ve learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. 2.07K
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five. 655
Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then. 1.11K
My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so. 645
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. 647
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. 630
