Happiness Quotes: For Life, Love, & Every Day

By Nathalie Boutros, Ph.D.
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.

Happiness can be hard to pin down. This collection of quotes from authors, thinkers, comedians, and philosophers may help you understand what happiness can be.

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Happiness is one of the six basic emotions shared by all people, regardless of cultural background, age, gender, or other demographic characteristics (Ekman, 1992). Despite the universal nature of happiness, it can often feel out of reach. For as long as people have been writing things down, they’ve been contemplating happiness - how to get happy, how to stay happy, and what it means to be happy. What follows is a collection of quotes, ancient through to modern, all offering their own words of wisdom and perspectives on happiness. Read on to see if any of these words of wisdom speak to you.

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Happiness Quotes for the Day

“I've got nothing to do today but smile.”
― Simon and Garfunkel, The Only Living Boy in New York

“It's about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun 

“Every time we’ve lived by a book that encourages us to commit acts of kindness and altruism, we’ve both felt better.”
― Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer,  How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books

Happiness Quotes About Life

“Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.”
― Rose Wilder Lane 

“When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to 'Enjoy now'. If I can enjoy the present, I don't need to count on the happiness that is (or isn't) waiting for me in the future".”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun 

“There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes 

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka 

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

Short Happiness Quotes

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
― Mahatma Gandhi 

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 

“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”
― Anne Frank 

“The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it's all that matters.”
― Audrey Hepburn 

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer 

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
― Gabriel García Márquez 

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck 

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life 

“Happiness is a state of activity.”
― Aristotle 
​
“Happiness is a warm puppy.”
― Charles M. Schulz

Happiness Quotes About Love

“I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John 

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness 

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 

“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow 

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss 

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.”
― Victor Hugo , Les Misérables 

“One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.”
― Gretchen Rubin 

“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage 

Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Happiness Quotes for Her

“Don’t let what he wants eclipse what you need. He is very dreamy,” she says. “But he is not the sun. You are.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes

“I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.”
― Maya Angelou, Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women

Happiness Quotes for Motivation

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
― Abraham Lincoln 

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
― Helen Keller 

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
― Dalai Lama XIV 

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
― Hunter S. Thompson 

“I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't you will eat away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. ”
― William James 

“Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt 

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx 

“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
― Barack Obama 

“The ninety and nine are with dreams, content, but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.”
― Edgar Allan Poe 

“I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.” 
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life 

“I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind.”
― Neil Gaiman

Happiness Quotes About Friends

“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.”
― John Lennon 

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”
― Martin Luther King Jr. 

“There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 

“The best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me? 

“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”
― Mark Twain 

"Happiness is not perfected until it is shared."
― African Proverb

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

Happiness Quotes About Family

“A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.”
― Paulo Coelho 

“My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success 
​
“To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

Happiness Quotes for Kids

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
― Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You! 

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”
― J.K.Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 

“It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda 

“Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
― A.A. Milne 

“What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.”
― A.A. Milne 

“Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh 

“I am happy. I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you as a friend.”
― Arnold Lobel, Days with Frog and Toad 

Happiness Quotes for Work

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts 

“Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it”
― Buddha 

“No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
― Theodore Roosevelt 

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
― Martin Luther King Jr. 

“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt 

“For work: I bought some pens. Normally, I used makeshift pens, the kind of unsatisfactory implements that somehow materialized in my bag or in a drawer. But one day, when I was standing in line to buy envelopes, I caught sight of a box of my favorite kind of pen: the Deluxe Uniball Micro. “Two ninety-nine for one pen!” I thought. “That’s ridiculous.” But after a fairly lengthy internal debate, I bought four. It’s such a joy to write with a good pen instead of making do with an underinked pharmaceutical promotional pen picked up from a doctor’s office. My new pens weren’t cheap, but when I think of all the time I spend using pens and how much I appreciate a good pen, I realize it was money well spent. Finely made tools help make work a pleasure.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project 

“They tell you: Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don’t stop dreaming until your dream comes true.

I think that’s crap.

I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people? Are busy doing.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes 

“Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral. Pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes

“Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.”
― John Stuart Mill, Autobiography 

“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Funny Happiness Quotes

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
― George Burns 

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
― Oscar Wilde 

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain 

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche 

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 

“I was happy as a clam. But who wants to be a clam?”
― Michael J. Fox, No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality 

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman 

“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.”
― Katharine Hepburn 

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?”
― A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

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• Famous Quotes for Life and Happiness​​
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Final Thoughts on Happiness Quotes

How do we find happiness and then keep it? The collection of quotes above suggests that happiness can be reached in so many different ways - from accomplishing great things to enjoying the little things, from being true to yourself, to serving others. All of these represent different potential pathways to happiness. I hope that after reading through these quotes you feel inspired to find and create your own happiness, whatever that means to you.

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References

Ekman, P. (1992). Are there basic emotions? Psychological Review, 99(3), 550–553. 

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