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Way too much happiness
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Published Wednesday, May 15, 2013 @ 4:05 AM EDT
May 15 2013

A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
-Honore de Balzac

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.
-Bette Davis

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
-Benjamin Disraeli

All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
-Bertrand Russell

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself.
-Don Marquis

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
-George Bernard Shaw

God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness in heaven, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he'll be there.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Grief and sadness knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger than common joys.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

Grief is the obverse of happiness. They are two sides of a single coin, and only the vulnerable know either.
-Irving Townsend

Happiness and misery depend as much on temperament as on fortune.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.
-Tom Magliozzi

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Ernest Hemingway

Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.
-(Bumper Sticker) Unattributed

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
-William S. Burroughs

Happiness is a form of courage.
-Holbrook Jackson

Happiness is a good feeling I get when things go a particular way; joy is an attitude I adopt in spite of how things go.
-Fil Anderson

Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
-Hermann Hesse

Happiness is a way station between too little and too much.
-Channing Pollock

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
-Robertson Davies

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
-Marcel Proust

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.
-Isaac Asimov

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
-Ingrid Bergman

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family- in another city.
-George Burns

Happiness is that ridiculous life goal of illiterates.
-Elias Cannetti

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
-Don Marquis

Happiness isn't good enough for me. I demand euphoria!
-(From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) Bill Watterson

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

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.
-George Sand

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
-Robert Frost

Happiness, it is said, is seldom found by those who seek it, and never by those who seek it for themselves.
-F. Emerson Andrews

He that is happy, by whatever means, desires nothing but the continuance of happiness.
-Samuel Johnson

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.
-Paul Sweeney

I believe that a man's pursuit of happiness should not be impeded by his employer's lack of imagination.
-Rob Neyer

I believe that inherent within the God-given right to the pursuit of happiness, is the equally God-given right to the pursuit of unhappiness. That is why I support gay marriage.
-Chuck Lorre

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-Aldous Huxley

I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
-John Stuart Mill

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices do.
-C.S. Lewis

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
-Bertrand Russell

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.
-C.S. Lewis

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-Thomas Paine

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.
-Thomas Paine

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-Agnes Repplier

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
-W. Somerset Maugham

It is poor government that does not realize that the prolonged life, health and happiness of its people are its greatest asset.
-William James Mayo

It's all there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only nation in the world based on happiness.
-P.J. O'Rourke

It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.
-Frank McKinney (Kin) Hubbard

Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you.
-Mark CHernoff

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
-Helen Keller

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
-George Orwell

Men who seek happiness are like drunkards who can never find their house but are sure that they have one.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.
-Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones)

Money can't buy you happiness, but it helps you look for it in a lot more places.
-Milton Berle

Money doesn't buy happiness, but with it at least you can be miserable in comfort.
-Unattributed

My recipe for marital happiness is whenever you can, read at meals.
-Cyril Connolly

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.
-Samuel Adams

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
-Mary Wollstonecraft

No one has a right to happiness.
-Eric Hoffer

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.
-Virginia Woolf

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.
-Guillaume Apollinaire

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.
-William Feather

One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
-Rita Mae Brown

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.
-Terry Pratchett

People far prefer happiness to wisdom, but that is like wanting to be immortal without getting older.
-Sydney J. Harris

Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
-Oscar Wilde

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
-Hosea Ballou

Reason, Observation and Experience- the Holy Trinity of Science- have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the way to be happy is to make others so. This is enough for us.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Remember: Anyone who says money can't buy happiness simply hasn't learned where to shop.
-Warren Buffett

Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness.
-Gustave Le Bon

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.
-Oscar Wilde

Sometimes it's hard to avoid the happiness of others.
-David Assael

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

That action is best which accomplishes the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.
-Francis Hutcheson

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.
-Henry Ward Beecher

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-Joseph Addison

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
-H.L. Mencken

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.
-Martha Washington

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
-Jeremy Bentham

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
-Ernest Dimnet

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.
-Bertrand Russell

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist.
-Thomas Paine

The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness.
-Albert Camus

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
-William Cowper

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.
-Aldous Huxley

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
-Eric Hoffer

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.
-James M. Barrie

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
-F.H. Bradley

The secret of happiness... is to be happy already.
-Julian Barnes

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible...
-Bertrand Russell

The secret to true happiness is a combination of low expectations and insensitivity.
-Olivia Goldsmith

The trouble is not that we are never happy- it is that happiness is so episodical.
-Ruth Benedict

There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.
-Helen Keller

There is no cosmetic for beauty like happiness.
-Unattributed

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.
-Dante Alighieri

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
-Anthony Trollope

There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.
-Unattributed

There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball, and that is to have a clear conscience, or none at all.
-Ogden Nash

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
-Buddha

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-Gustave Flaubert

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
-Bertrand Russell

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
-Erich Fromm

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-George Bernard Shaw

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.
-Thomas Jefferson

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
-Jane Austen

You can't postpone sorrow, so why would you postpone happiness?
-Robert Brault


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