Quotes to inspire and reflect

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one—keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

Every man’s happiness is built on the unhappiness of another.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something.

It is God’s giving if we laugh or weep.

A merry heart goes all the day, / Your sad tires in a mile-a.

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering—from positive evil.

Unhappy is the man, though he rule the world, who doesn’t consider himself supremely blest.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happ'iness.

When [man] is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn t analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.

It is not enough to be happy, it is also necessary that others not be.

There is some shadow of delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very lap of melancholy.

There are many roads / to happiness, if the gods assent.

A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.

Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.

One can bear grief, but it takes two to be glad.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise.

Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.

Of mortals there is no one who is happy. / If wealth flows in upon one, one may be perhaps / Luckier than one’s neighbor, but still not happy.

To fill the hour,—that is happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval.

Happiness depends, as Nature shows, / Less on exterior things than most suppose.

True joy is the earnest which we have of heaven, it is the treasure of the soul, and therefore should be laid in a safe place, and nothing in this world is safe to place it in.

The right to happiness is fundamental: / Men live so little time and die alone.

It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.

When we are not rich enough to be able to purchase happiness, we must not approach too near and gaze on it in shop windows.

A man’s happiness,—to do the things proper to man.

Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.

True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

’Tis not the beard that makes the philosopher.

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

Laws are never as effective as habits.

There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady’s headdress: within my own memory I have known it rise and fall above thirty degrees.

It is not in novelty but in habit that we find the greatest pleasure.

Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.

Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton.

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death’s best weapons.

Nothing more unqualifies a man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.

Where guilt is, rage and courage doth abound.