Great Throughts Treasury

"Every person in the world may not become a personage. But every person may become a personality. The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Interesting thoughts can live only in cultivated minds. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays at the theater, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world; and they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others." - William Lyon Phelps

"The greatest humbug in the world is the idea that money can make a man happy. I never had any satisfaction with mine until I began to do good with it." - Charles Pratt, 1st Earl of Camden

"He is not happy who does not think himself so." - Publius Syrus

"Life is long to the miserable, but short to the happy." - Publius Syrus

""Did you have a happy childhood?" is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being." - Paul Reichmann

"What pleasure can those over-happy persons know, who, from their affluence and luxury, always eat before they are hungry and drink before they are thirsty?" - Samuel Richardson

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood." - Tom Robbins, fully Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins

"Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it." -

"Happiness is dependent on the taste, and not on things. It is by having what we like that we are made happy, not by having what others think desirable." -

"The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use owe make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egotism; let him learn that he is as much dependent others as others are on him." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala

"If your life is not one-pointed, you cannot feel happy, fearless and powerful. You will always feel a little insecure, a little weak, a little distracted." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." - Albert Schweitzer

"One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve." - Albert Schweitzer

"A scholar who depends on his own labor... may be called happy." - Sefer Eliyahu Rabbah

"The security of nations is like happiness in love; a happy miracle which it is necessary to create anew every day." - Count Carlo Sforza

"No man is happy but by comparison." - Thomas Shadwell

"We know nothing of to-morrow; our business is to be good and happy to-day." - Sydney Smith

"To give pain is the tyranny - to make happy the true empire of beauty." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget is to be happy." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

"Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true." - Leon J. Suenens, fully Leo Jozef Suenens

"It would seem that by our sorrows only we are called to a knowledge of the Infinite. Are we happy? The limits of life constrain us on all sides." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

"The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

"Those who make us happy are always thankful to us for being so; their gratitude is the reward of their benefits." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof

"Our chief wisdom consists in knowing our follies and faults, that we may correct them. True wisdom is a thing very extraordinary. Happy are they that have it; and next to them, not the many that think they have it, but the few that are sensible of their own defects and imperfections, and know that they have it not." -

"Hope is bad for the happy man, and good for the unhappy." -

"What is the best time to do each thing? Who are the most important people to work with? What is the most important thing to do at all times?... There is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life." -

"Be understood in thy teaching and instruct to the measure of capacity. Precepts and rules are repulsive to a child, but happy illustration wins him." -

"I am still determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go." - Martha Washington, fully Martha Dandridge Curtis Washington

"Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness. Thus happy have we seen the country." - Daniel Webster

"In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ways." - Edith Wharton

"The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy." -

"The man whom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his troubles under the friendly shade of every tree, and may experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence." - Stefan Zweig

"Do not imagine that the journey is short; one must have the heart of a lion to follow this unusual road, for it is very long and the sea is deep. One plods along in a state of amazement, sometimes smiling sometimes weeping. As for me, I shall be happy to discover even a trace of Him. That would indeed be something, but to live without Him would be a reproach. A man must not keep his soul from the beloved but must be in a fitting state to lead his soul to the court of the King." -

"People who are happy have found an internal harmony by participating fully in the world from the platform of their strengths and passions, having come somewhat to terms with their foibles and weakness." - Carol Adrienne

"Happy are those whose life is today and only today. Sad are the prophets and those others whose eyes are open to the past. Blessed are they who neither see their painful yesterdays nor their tomorrows filled with despair: they rest in peace." - Ayi Kwei Armah

"No human being can make another one happy." -

"Very little indeed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." -

"The happy, self-unfolded people are those who, with a will to believe in the world and the life within, have found that the secret of really getting the most out of life is to make the most of the qualities that are innately their own." - Marcus Bach, fully James Marcus Bach

"The happy man is he who lives the life of love, not for the honors it may bring, but for the life itself." - Abdul Baha, or ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, born `Abbás Effendí

"The essential difference between the unhappy, neurotic type person is the difference between get and give. The unhappy person is concerned with: the world is against me, what’s in it for me, what are people doing to me, and so forth. When your central theme in life is getting you usually do get headaches. But the happy person is looking toward what he can do, what he can give, what he can accomplish." - Joe D. Batten and Leonard C. Hudson

"The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom – yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world. Doubtless at the price of its repudiation evil and suffering could be abolished, and the world forced to be “good” and “happy”; but man would have lost his likeness to God, which primarily resides in his freedom." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

"Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again--this is the brave and happy life." - J.E. Buckrose, pseudonym of Annie Edith Foster Jameson

"Victory breeds hate, for the conquered is unhappy. He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented is happy." -

"Act as if you were already happy and that will trend to make you happy." -

"Act as if you were already happy and that will tend to make you happy." -

"Peace of mind is the greatest asset we can have for happy, healthy living. This is an inner victory which only comes from knowing God intimately. Then the material things of life do not both us any longer - we live in a spiritual world, and spiritual values are the only real values in life." - Albert E Cliffe