Happiness and Joy

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.

Money will not make you happy, and happy will not make you money.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Nota nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down onor to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

 

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self: “The work is done.” But just as one says that, the answer comes: “The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.” The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.

It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

You can't deny laughter when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed.

The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.

The most wasted day of all is that in which we have not laughed.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,

 

Sleep not, dream not; this bright day Will not, cannot last for aye; Bliss like thine is bought by years Dark with torment and with tears.

 

How fares it with the happy dead?

 

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; Tomorrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New Year; Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

 

Pain is short, and joy is eternal.