Happiness Paradox Quotes

The word "utopia" has two meanings. It means both "good place" and "nowhere". That's the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn't want to live in the perfect place, either. "A life time of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on earth," wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman.

More wealth doesn't fix your life. More wealth makes you more of what you already are.

Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.

I've become the person I've always hated, but I'm happier.

Since ancient times, philosophers have maintained that to strive too hard for one's own happiness is self-defeating.

All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better— So why do I hate my life?

It's nonsense to say money doesn't buy happiness, but people exaggerate the extent to which more money can buy more happiness.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

The happiest people I know are people who don't even think about being happy. They just think about being good neighbors, good people. And then happiness sort of sneaks in the back window while they are busy doing good.

Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?

Sometimes, it is precisely when you discover that you are living very happily that you suddenly find yourself in danger. To be happy means to discover that you are exposed to being hurt.

Money doesn't make you happy - I know people in the U.K. with money, they never seem to be happy.

If a man is happy in America, it is considered he is doing something wrong.

A happy but miserable state in which man finds himself from time to time; sometimes he believes he is happy by loving, then suddenly he finds how miserable he is. It is all joy, it sweetens life, but it does not last. It comes and goes, but when it is active, there is no greater virtue, because it makes one supremely happy.

Everything's amazing right now, and nobody's happy.

Rich people making their houses bigger in order to make their lives happier wind up hurting their own marriages. There's a deep irony here. Do the couples perceive that irony?

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.

I sometimes wish I weren't as logical as I am and I wish I weren't as smart as I am, because I'd be happy.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

One kind of happiness is to know exactly at what point to be miserable.

The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.

The goal of my life isn't just... to be happy. 'Wouldn't it be easier if it was, though?