Philip James Bailey Quotes

If you optimize everything, you will always be 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 ever expect to be permanently happy. I don't think that's part of the human condition.

I don't think success arrives and you're suddenly happy. It's not like that. If people think that they'll be very disappointed.

You'd imagine Mick would be the happiest person in the world, and yet a lot of the times he isn't.

As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I'm successful, I never feel like I'm anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I'm never content.

Neither friends nor wealth nor learning have the power to make us glad.

I was always a happy kid. I'd play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It's a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?

I've definitely gone through phases where I'm not happy with my life, and you notice in little ways until they start adding up.

Since my life has been wayward and impulsive, always a search for something that is not there, and then disillusionment, I believe I need all the excuses I can make.

I don't ever think a day is a perfect day. There's always something.

The trouble is not that we are never happy-it is that happiness is so episodical.

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.

And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it's only a moment's pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time.

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

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

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

Nobody wants to live with a person who'll never be happy.

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.

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

I have given up considering happiness as relevant.

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.

There's no way that a clear mind can live an unhappy life.

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned or worn.