Cormac McCarthy Quotes

People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.

The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy.

Linus: What would you say you want most out of life, Charlie Brown? To be happy? CB: Oh, no. I don't expect that. I really don't. I just don't want to be unhappy!

I Don't Think There's A Good Excuse For Being Unhappy. I'm Not Particularly Unhappy, But I Know What Pain Is. I think That Life Is Characterized By Pain, Partly. Part Of The Way You Can Tell You're Alive Is By How Much Pain You're Experiencing, Or How Little.

Happiness. We're tearing our hair out to try to find a definition of it, for heaven's sake. Is it joy? People will tell you that it isn't, that joy is a fleeting emotion, a moment of happiness, which is always welcome, mind you. And then what about pleasure, huh? Oh, yes, that's easy, everybody knows what that is, but there again it doesn't last. But is happiness not the sum total of lots of small joys and pleasures, huh?

No one is happy all his life long.

I think if you're an unhappy person, you're always going to be an unhappy person. You're probably going to be less unhappy if your business is doing well, if I'm being honest.

I don't ever expect to be permanently happy. I don't think that's part of the human condition.

What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.

I've had happy moments in my life, but I don't think that happiness-- being happy-- is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn't that way.

Happiness is a state of mind. You can be happy or you can be unhappy.

One is never as happy or as unhappy as one thinks.

What is happiness and unhappiness? It depends so little on the circumstances; it depends really only on what happens inside a person. I am grateful for every day and that makes me happy.

The happy have whole days, and those they choose. The unhappy have but hours, and those they lose.

No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.

I'm so lucky to be crazy happy in my life. And I think it's not so much that I'm happier now than ever; it's that I'm more content. I'm in the harbor of my life.

Money will never make you happy if you are an unhappy person.

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

Happiness is liberty from everything that makes us unhappy.

Happy is one of the many things I'm likely to be over the course of a day and certainly over the course of a lifetime. But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life--more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time--well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.

It isn’t happiness I am concerned with but experience.

Usually we try to figure out what we think would make us happy, and then try to make those things happen. But happiness isn't circumstance-de pendent. There are people who have every reason in the world to be happy who aren't. There are people with genuine problems who are. The key to happiness is the decision to be happy.

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.