Happiness Trade-off Quotes

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

Would you rather live one perfect day over and over or live your life with no perfect days but just decent ones?

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

Rather than have joy, I would rather be absent of pain.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

They say it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise like moderately rich and just moody?

I just don't think any job is worth sacrificing your private life for.

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.

But though it cannot be reasonable not to gain happiness for fear of losing it, yet it must be confessed, that in proportion to the pleasure of possession, will be for some time our sorrow for the loss.

It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification.

You can't write masterpieces in your 80s and be happy too.

Didn't books say that too: that there is always price to pay for happiness?

Wen you're a married man, Samivel, you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now; but vether it's worth while goin' through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy sand ven he go to the end of the alphabet, it's a matter of taste.

I would say to anyone starting out that if their priority in life is happiness, then don't be a musician.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost.

Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another.