Michael Sandel Quotes

What I really want for my children is that they be loved and that they be happy and that they lead a good life.

Very often when we aim at the best, or what we may think is the best for our children, we aim really at lesser things, such as getting into a certain college.

If you really want success in life, it's two-fold. You want to be able to take care of yourself and take care of yourself well, but there's the other side in which you want to be able to take care of yourself so that you're a happy person, so that you're passing those qualities and those tools onto your children.

I am well pleased with what I hear of you: The principal Satisfaction I can expect in Life, in future will be in your good Behavior and that of my other Children. My Hopes from all of you are very agreable. God grant, I may not be disappointed.

There's a happiness about me, a confidence and a happiness that I didn't have when I was younger. You feel good inside, you look good outside. I feel like I look like somebody who's having a good life, who's enjoying it a little better than I did before. You can be really good-looking in your twenties but feel miserable, and people just sort of walk away.

I think everyone wants for their kids the good things that they had.

I never look back at all. All of my sentiment and emotion goes into my family. I'm an extremely family oriented person and I have a very, very happy family life. That doesn't just include blood relations. I have friends who are close to me.

I've got a good life, and I don't think anything can rock that anymore.

I don't want to jump off the roof or jump for joy depending on my movie reviews, or whether it makes money. I think the larger, more meaningful things are family and the people you love.

She thinks that happiness is a mat that sits on her doorway.

And when all is said and done, there is no greater success in the world than just being happy.

It's more important to be happy than well-dressed.

I invested in the album. Look, if I never did anything again in music, it wouldn’t affect my life materially. I live a very satisfying life. Not because I’ve made a few dollars, but because I have a wife who loves me and children who wait for me to come home. And that is beautiful. I think that’s the American dream: to be at peace at home.

Sometimes happiness is a blessing, but generally it is a conquest. Each day's magic moment helps.

I just want my children to be happy. And to be good people. Proper people. That's all.

To be loved, I think, is the thing that gets you up in the morning.

I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

If you are born into a family with little money but a lot of love, you will find yourself more content than one who is born with a silver spoon and an empty home.

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them. We all feel instinctively, that our children's success reflect glory upon ourselves, while their failures make us feel shame. Unfortunately, the successes which cause us to swell with pride are often of an undesirable kind.... Neither happiness nor virtue, but worldly success, is what the average father desires for his children.

Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.

We all want to leave our children the Garden of Eden and we wind up giving them hardscrabble.

I am only as good as my children are.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

A person is never happy till their vague strivings has itself marked out its proper limitations.