Quotes to inspire and reflect

Hatred is so lasting and stubborn, that reconciliation on a sickbed certainly forebodes death.

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.

Even hatred of vileness / Distorts a man’s features.

Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bitter-sweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them.

Do nothing hastily but catching of fleas.

Desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly.

It is indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

’Tis not the beard that makes the philosopher.

Laws are never as effective as habits.

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