Happiness and Misery

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Anaïs Nin, in Happiness and Misery and Wisdom and Ignorance

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

John Stuart Mill, in Happiness and Misery

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

To live a perfect life, you must ask nothing, give nothing, and expect nothing.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Henry Louis Mencken, in Happiness and Misery

Live each day as if it were the last day of your life, because so far, it is.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Living well is the best revenge.

George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, in Happiness and Misery

Nostalgia is the realization that things weren't as unbearable as they seemed at the time.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Misery is optional.

S. Gilmary Beagle, in Happiness and Misery

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, in Happiness and Misery

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

John F. Kennedy, in Happiness and Misery

Life is short. Live it up.

Nikita Khrushchev, (New York Times Magazine, August 3, 1958), in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

D. H. Lawrence, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

If you wish you be like someone else, you waste the person you are.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant, in Happiness and Misery

It is by fighting and triumphing over the enemies of the Buddha that we ourselves become Buddhas.

Daisaku Ikeda, (World Tribune, Oct. 29, 1999, p. 5), in Happiness and Misery and Science and Religion