My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

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.

Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth.

Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?

A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

Imagination disposes of everything it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

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

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.

Happiness is a how not a what. A talent, not an object.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

Bride: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

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.

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.

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.

When you are 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.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.