"America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered."
"I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being."
"I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food."
"The gratification of desire is not happiness."
"When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed."
"It is the true duty of every man to promote the happiness of his fellow creatures to the utmost of his power."
"Happiness is not that easy to achieve, but having a handsome husband, a beautiful baby, and a great job helps."
"Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?"
"An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it."
"An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness."
"When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole."
"Happiness is being on the beam with life - to feel the pull of life."
"We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy."
"People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal."
"Let us never know what old age is. Let us know the happiness time brings, not count the years."
"How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy."
"God dislikes evil, and no happiness can be built on hate. Love one another as brothers."
"Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy."
"That should be the measure of success for everyone. It's not money, it's not fame, it's not celebrity; my index of success is happiness."
"Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it."
"Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it."
"Happiness is an inside job."
"Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it."
"Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity."
"The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself."
"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe."
"Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt."
"In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge."
"Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it."
"There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have."