Daniel Handler Quotes

Rage is for little wrongs; despair is dumb.

self-pity is better than none.

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?

People say you make your best work when you're in despair and all that, and at your lowest - but for me, I think happiness makes you positive, and I think that's a good creative place to write from.

I often say that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.

I like happiness, and when people try to destroy that, it winds me up.

Everyone just wants to feel good, and I don't think that all music is designed to make you feel good.

Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure.

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

There isn't a new sorrow in the world -- they're all old ones -- but we can all find new happiness if we look in the right way.

Everyone is a little bitter. We're born bitter. The personality itself is really just a very complex defense mechanism. A reaction to the first time someone said, "No you can't.

You don't get depressed because bad things happen to you. That's getting pissed off and annoyed. That's reasonable. Someone hits you in the face you go ow, you know that's... but depression is something that happens like weather to you inside you.

Happiness is lost by criticizing it; sorrow by accepting it.

How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping?

The capacity to be either happy or unhappy is determined by the manner in which you react to whatever happens.

At the very instant that you think, "I am happy," a chemical messenger translates your emotion, which has no solid existence whatever in the material world, into a bit of matter so perfectly attuned to your desire that literally every cell in your body learns of your happiness and joins in.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

I can't cheer up — I don't want to cheer up. It's nicer to be miserable!

Happiness takes work. It doesn't always fall off trees or come easily. You really have to be someone that doesn't fall prey to being sad. I don't want sad, I can't be sad, I don't want to be about sad; I avoid sad. It inherently envelops you, so do everything that you can to escape it all the time.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

Maybe depression is the most reasonable response to all the crap around us. Maybe it's the happy people who need medication.

Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.