Happiness and Joy

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

Il faut rire avant que d’être heureux, de peur de mourir sans avoir ri.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! The Story of My Life (1902) ch. 4

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.

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.

Nihil est ab omni

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero Pulsanda tellus.

Smiling through her tears.

There trembled through

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;

There’s a cool web of language winds us in,

How wide the limits stand

How happy he who crowns in shades like these,

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

To fill the hour—that is happiness.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z . Work is x ; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

What larks.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

He told me … that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness.