Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is largely a choice, not a right or entitlement. We can only (barely) control our own reactions to it. You have to sweat – that’s the only moral they know. People are unhappy when they get something too easily. It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. “Happiness is not a goal it is a by-product.” – Eleanor Roosevelt Nobody really cares if you’re miserable, so you might as well be happy. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing.
If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness. The secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is courage. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. “Happiness is a form of courage.” – Holbrook JacksonĮven a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human-in not having to be just happy or just sad-in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him. To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. Bertrand RussellĪ great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination. Happiness consists more in conveniences of pleasure that occur everyday than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom. “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” – AristotleĪll happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.