Artificial Happiness Quotes

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.

There is no greater misery than false joys.

I have learned to smile when I wasn't happy, to sing when I didn't feel like it, and to do things just to please my fans.

In 'The Giver,' I play a character called Jonas who is a member of this community called Changeless. In this community, everyone is kept at bay emotionally and physically. They receive an injection every morning to control them from feeling things like love and pain and all natural emotions.

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

That woman in the shampoo commercial - she's happy. She's... she's too happy.

There's nothing more painful than something that's superficially upbeat but you can kind of tell behind it that there's a cynicism, or even a bitterness.

The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so.

Strong drink stupefies a man and makes it possible for him to forget; it gives him an artificial cheeriness, an artificial excitement; and the pleasure of this state is increased by the low level of civilization and the narrow empty life to which these men are confined.

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.

You're children. Don't you want a home, a family?" "With, like, vitamin-fortified cereal and educational television?

…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

Phones and soundtracks and Muzak and fountains replace genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy.

To what purpose is it to be artificially happy on the surface?