Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
Francis Bacon
1. "The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation."
George Bernard Shaw, "Parents and Children"
Other categories: Work and Laziness
2. "If marriages were made by putting all the men's names into one sack and the women's names into another, and having them taken out by a blindfolded child like lottery numbers, there would be just as high a percentage of happy marriages as we have here in England."
George Bernard Shaw, "Misalliance"
Other categories: Marriage
3. "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry"
Other categories: Art and Culture
4. "Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent."
Francis Picabia, "Who Knows: Poems and Aphorisms"
Other categories: Pain and Tears
5. "Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character."
George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"
Other categories: Various
6. "Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness."
Henrik Ibsen, "The Wild Duck"
Other categories: Life and Death
7. "Marriage enlarges the Scene of our Happiness and Miseries."
Joseph Addison
Other categories: Marriage
8. "Happiness is a hard master — particularly other people’s happiness."
Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World"
Other categories: Envy
9. "The happiness of society is the end of government."
John Adams, "Thoughts on Government"
Other categories: Authority, Government
10. "To make a man perfectly happy tell him he works too hard, that he spends too much money, that he is “misunderstood” or that he is “different”; none of this is necessarily complimentary, but it will flatter him infinitely more that merely telling him that he is brilliant, or noble, or wise, or good."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Woman and Man
11. "To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Love -:- Woman and Man
12. "Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."
Anne Frank
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
13. "The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star."
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "Physiologie du Gout"
Other categories: Science and Technology
14. "Optimism is the one quality more associated with success and happiness than any other."
Brian Tracy
Other categories: Optimism and Hope -:- Success and Fame
15. "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
Andrew Carnegie
Other categories: Success and Fame
16. "How unhappy is he who cannot forgive himself."
Publilius Syrus
Other categories: Forgiveness
17. "The secret of happiness is to make others believe they are the cause of it."
Al Batt
18. "Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling."
Margaret Lee Runbeck
19. "Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come."
Chinese proverb
20. "When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise."
William Makepeace Thackeray
Other categories: Love
21. "The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness."
Arthur Schopenhauer
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
22. "All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy."
Spike Milligan
Other categories: Richness and Money
23. "Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory."
Albert Schweitzer
Other categories: Memory
24. "Happiness is what happens to us when we try to make someone else happy."
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25. "If you depend on others to make you happy, you will be endlessly disappointed."
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26. "Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change."
Friedrich von Schiller
27. "When you look at your life the greatest happiness are family happinesses."
Joyce Brothers
Other categories: Family and Loneliness
28. "A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to."
Russell Baker
Other categories: Question and Problem
29. "The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do."
Sathya Sai Baba
30. "When one door closes, fortune will usually open another."
Fernando de Rojas
Other categories: Various
31. "Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work."
Letty Cottin Pogrebin, "Family and Politics"
Other categories: Love -:- Work and Laziness
32. "Money can't buy happiness but it bought me every skyscrapper in New York."
Andrew Carnegie
Other categories: Richness and Money
33. "The happiest times of humanity are the blank pages in the book of history."
Leopold von Ranke
Other categories: History and Nations
34. "Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills."
Soichiro Honda
Other categories: Work and Laziness
35. "A happy person is one whose arithmetic is at its best when they is counting their blessings."
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Other categories: Joy and Sadness
36. "The secret of a happy marriage remains a secret."
Henny Youngman
Other categories: Marriage
37. "Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness."
Zhuang Zi
38. "There is room in the smallest cottage for a happy loving pair."
Friedrich von Schiller
Other categories: Love
39. "Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product."
Eleanor Roosevelt
40. "We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves."
François de La Rochefoucauld
41. "Happiness consists of three things: someone to love, work to do, and a clear conscience."
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Other categories: Sin and Conscience -:- Work and Laziness
42. "Happiness is not a possession to be prized. It is a quality of thought, a state of mind."
Daphme du Maurier
43. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde
44. "True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not."
Seneca the Younger
45. "Heaven is where the police are British, the mechanics German, the cooks are French, the lovers Italian, and all is organize by the Swiss."
Eliane Kirchner
Other categories: Joy and Sadness
46. "A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
Hugh Downs
47. "The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness."
Francis Herbert Bradley, "Aphorisms"
Other categories: Dreams and Desires
48. "Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness."
Georges Simenon
Other categories: Art and Culture
49. "Happiness is a good martini, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman... or a bad woman, depending on how much happiness you can stand."
George Burns
Other categories: Woman and Man
50. "Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have."
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2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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