I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?
I have to tell you something. I cannot help being happy. I’ve struggled against it but to no good. Apart from an odd five minutes here and there, I have been happy all my life. There is, I am well aware, no virtue whatever in this. It results from a combination of heredity, health, good fortune, and shallow intellect.
Happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.
He loved being happy! He loved happiness like I love tea.
When you are unhappy or dissatisfied, is there anything in the world more maddening than to be told that you should be contented with your lot?
I have guarded myself more carefully against contented people than against contagious diseases.
To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore to be happy one must love or love to suffer. Or suffer from too much happiness.
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
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. . . . He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar stud that has rolled under the dressing table.
You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind.
It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how . . . and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it.
There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. So also with faith. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.
Happiness is nothing but everyday living seen through a veil.
Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
My creed is this: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.
