Happiness and Joy

Beauty is only a promise of happiness.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.

It isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No—it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Nothing so soon the drooping Spirits can raise, As Praises from the Men, whom all Men Praise.

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

The man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him, and he will certainly miss him.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

Money is human happiness in the abstract.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

I never knew how much like heaven this world could be, when two people love and live for one another!

Life is a rainbow which also includes black.

Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge— is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

Those undeserved joys which come uncalled and make us more pleased than grateful are they that sing.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one’s powers towards some great end.

When large numbers of people share their joy in common, the happiness of each is greater because each adds fuel to the other’s flame.

There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.