Happiness Concept Quotes

The pursuit of happiness is an overview kind of thing. It's not in the Bill of Rights.

Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller 'Self-Help.'

People deserve to be happy.

Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment.

I do not like the idea of happiness - it is too momentary - I would say that I was always busy and interested in something - interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage.

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.

What I've also noticed is the term happiness, or happy is intimidating to some people. Some people deny that it's even possible to be happy, or to achieve happiness. Happiness sounds like this magical destination that you arrive at and then everything is sort of solved, or it's different.

If you asked somebody, 'what do you wish for in life?' they wouldn't say 'happiness.' I would have answered 'excitement, knowledge,' God knows - I mean, many, many different things, but certainly not 'happiness'. It seemed like a foreign concept to wish for something that specific and that singular.

The concept of happiness has to be reorganised.

Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

U.K. psychologist Daniel Nettle thinks of happiness as a carrot on a stick, designed by evolution to show the right way, and also designed so that we will never permanently reach it. We likely would just sit around and eat sweet and fatty foods all day, and that is simply not in the interest of evolution.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.

When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.

In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

We all want to be happy. We need to expand the notion of what that means, to make it bigger and wiser.

There can be many different views of what Heaven is like, because Heaven is whatever makes each person eternally and fully happy.

Like the man said, can happiness buy money?

You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.

Sometimes I think it's easier to think about being happier, for what ever that means to you then worrying about what is happiness and what would life be if I finally achieved this ultimate happiness?

Thinking about all that - what it means to be happy - I think it overloaded your brain.

The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It's a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.