Happiness and Misery

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon, 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

Living well is the best revenge.

George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 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

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

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.

Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book, in Happiness and Misery

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.

George Orwell, 1984, in 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

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

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

Oscar Levant, in Happiness and Misery

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, in Happiness and Misery

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

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