Margaret Deland Quotes

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.

What are you going to focus on, that's what affects everybody's life. If you focus on what you can't control, you're a little crazy inside, angry and depressed. If you focus most of the time on what you don't have instead of what you do have, you're going to be extremely unhappy.

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

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

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

It is not a sin to be happy, it is not a virtue to be miserable.

A lot of people are kind of depressed. I'm happy some of the time, and some of the time I'm not.

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.

Happiness and unhappiness differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one pressed in tin ... Each carries the same water.

I don't know what happiness is. I have periods of feeling joyous and peaceful and excited about what I'm doing, but I am also frequently very sad.

I suspect that happiness is not a state but rather a transition.

Why do people spend their time being sad when they could be happy?

Treat unhappiness as a defect and fewer would embrace it.

I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.

Passively accepting your sadness is the same as forgetting to build your own happiness. Happiness is more than a mood. It's a long-lasting state that is more accurately called well-being.

Personally, I've never had it as a goal in life to be happy. Seems impossible to achieve. Even the Declaration of Independence seems to acknowledge this. They talk about the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.

I ain't crazy, I'm just not satisfied.

If you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

I would rather have been beaten up in the media than live a life that wasn't happy.

I never could be good when I was not happy.

If you are happy, you can give happiness. If you don't love yourself and if you are unhappy with yourself, you can't give anything else but that.