65 Happiness Quotes

Sometimes we all need a gentle reminder that the most important thing is to be happy.

Happiness quotes are bite-sized pieces of wisdom that remind us that happiness is a choice. They can help lift us out of a funk, improve our mood, and give us a better outlook on life. In addition, happiness quotes can inspire us to make choices each day that will make us happy, instead of miserable.

Look through the happiness quotes below and do the following:

• Copy your favorite ones down.
• Share them with a friend.
• Make a list of action steps that you’ll take based on the wisdom contained in these happiness quotes.
• Memorize one or two of these quotes and repeat them to yourself whenever you need a lift-me-up.

Here are 65 happiness quotes to brighten your day and bring a smile to your face.

1. “All seasons are beautiful for the person who carries happiness within.” — Horace Friess

2. “The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.” — Allan K. Chalmers

3. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” — Albert Schweitzer

4. “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.” — Anne Frank

5. “Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place. But there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.” — E.L. Konigsburg

6. “The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.” — H.H. the Dalai Lama

7. “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” — Helen Keller

8. “The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.” — James Oppenheim

9. “We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”– Frederick Keonig

10. “There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” — Anthony de Mello

11. “How to be happy when you are miserable. Plant Japanese poppies with cornflowers and mignonette, and bed out the petunias among the sweet-peas so that they shall scent each other. See the sweet-peas coming up. Drink very good tea out of a thin Worcester cup of a colour between apricot and pink . . .” — Rumer Godden

12. “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

13. “How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

14. “Health is not just the absence of a disease. It’s an inner joyfulness that should be ours all the time; a state of positive well-being.” — Deepak Chopra

15. “The really happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery when on a detour.” — Unknown

16. “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.” — Margaret Lee Runbeck

17. “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” — Anon

18. “When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.” — H.H. the Dalai Lama

19. “Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.” — William Makepeace Thackeray

20. “Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.”– Jacques Prévert

21. “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.”– Doris Lessing

22. “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self- gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” — Helen Keller

23. “It’s not how much we have, but how much we enjoy that makes happiness.”– Unknown

24. “To live long and achieve happiness, cultivate the art of radiating happiness.”– Malcolm Forbes

25. “Happiness is really a deep harmonious inner satisfaction and approval.” — Francis Wilshire

26. “Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.” – – Joseph W. Krutch

27. “Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don’t really mean anything.” — Norman Lear

28. “A person will be called to account on Judgement Day for every permissible thing he might have enjoyed but did not.” — Talmud

29. “A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

30. “When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It’s to enjoy each step along the way.” — Wayne Dyer

31. “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.” — Helen Keller

32. “If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.” — Helen Keller

33. “Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”– Norman Vincent Peale

34. “Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.” — Seneca

35. “Happy people plan actions, they don’t plan results.” –Dennis Wholey

36. “Being happy doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you have decided to look beyond the imperfections.” –Unknown

37. “Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. — A.A. Milne

38. “True happiness 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.” — Joseph Addison

39. “Happiness is a conscious choice, not an automatic response.” — Mildred Barthel

40. “The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others. — William Lyon Phelps

41. “Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition.” — Arthur Rubinstein

42. “Like swimming, riding, writing, or playing golf, happiness can be learned.” — Boris Sokoloff

43. “If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.” — W Wolfe

44. “Happiness radiates like the fragrance from a flower, and draws all good things toward you.” — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

45. “The happiness of society is the end of government.” — John Adams

46. “Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.” — Sigmund Freud

47. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.” — Willa Cather, My Antonia

48. ” . . . {B}ut then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere . . . ” — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

49. “Money is a needful and precious thing, and when well used, a noble thing, but I never want you to think it is the first or only prize to strive for. I’d rather see you poor men’s wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace.” — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

50. “I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” — Arthur Rubinstein, Polish-American classical pianist

51. “We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castañeda

52. “All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it’s truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.” — Dennis Prager

53. “I believe… that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.” — Thomas Jefferson

54. “Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

55. “To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

56. “So often, we blame other people when, really, the problem is right down in here. I’m not happy. I don’t know what’s wrong. If I just had another job, I could be happy. If I just get married, I would be happy. Well if I just wasn’t married, I would be happy. Well, if I just had some kids, I’ll be happy. I’ll be happy when these kids finally grow up and get out of here. If I had a bigger house, I would be happy. Well, I got a big house. Now if I just had a maid to clean, I’d be happy. Well, now if I just had a maid I could get along with better, I’d be happy.” — Joyce Meyer

57. “I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things . . . which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising” — Edward Norton

58. “I care less about the gross national product and more about the gross national happiness.” — King of Bhutan

59. “Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” — Groucho Marx

60. “You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy ice cream. And that’s kind of the same thing.” – Unknown

61. “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” — Dale Carnegie

62. “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.” – Colette

63. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Harold Whitman

64. “The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.” – Claudius Claudianus

65. “This is the true joy of life–the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.” — G. Bernard Shaw

Choose your favorite happiness quotes from those above, and put them up where you’ll be sure to see them often. Then, use them as encouragement to live your best life.

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• Five Powerful Ways to Forgive Those Who Have Wronged You

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