But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.
Jane Austen,Pride&Prejudice
Showing posts with label Happiness poems and quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Happiness poems and quotes. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
You don't feel like smiling? Then what? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or sing. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. Here is the way the psychologist and philosopher William James put it: "Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Your smile is a messenger of your good will. Your smile brightens the lives of all who see it. To someone who has seen a dozen people frown, scowl or turn their faces away, your smile is like the sun breaking through the clouds.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
How to be Happy Though Human If we want to know what happiness is we must seek it, not as if it were a part of gold at the end of the rainbow, but among human beings who are living richly and fully the good life. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double Dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar gold button that has rolled under the cupboard in his bed room. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living 24 crowded hours of the day. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed, if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, power, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late. For those who seek the larger happiness and greater effectiveness open to human beings there can be but one philosophy of life, a philosophy of constructive altruism. The truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. The good life demands a working philosophy as an orientating map of conduct. This is the golden way of life. This is the satisfying life. This is the way to be happy though human.
W. Beran Wolfe
Friday, September 21, 2012
Where Dolphins Dance Again, the work starts as soon as you open your eyes in the morning. Hopefully you got some good rest last night. Why go into the city or the fields without first kissing the Friend who always stands at your door? It takes only a second. Habits are human nature. Why not create some that will mint gold? Your arms are violin bows always moving. I have become very conscious upon whom we all play. Thus my eyes have filled with warm soft oceans of divine music where jeweled dolphins dance, then leap into this world.
by Hafiz
excerpted from the book
The Subject Tonight Is Love
by Daniel Ladinsky.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Through humour, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it. Humour is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. Humour is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place. Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. Honest good humour is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.
William James
Bill Cosby
Christopher Morley
Mark Twain
Roman Gary
Washington Irving
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter. The kind of humour I like is that which makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes. Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gordon W. Allport
William Davis
Victor Borge
Victor Hugo
Charlie Chaplin
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy -- not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call 'following your bliss.' If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
Joseph Campbel
Monday, June 4, 2012
Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. Happiness is like those palaces in fairytales whose gates are guarded by dragons: We must fight in order to conquer it. We are always in a hurry to be happy...; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune. For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.
Alexandre Dumas,The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas
Friday, May 25, 2012
We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh. it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while Don Marquis A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. George Santayana
Friedrich Nietzsche
Monday, May 21, 2012
When you think things are bad, I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack. Dr. Seuss
when you feel sour and blue,
when you start to get mad...
you should do what I do!
Just tell yourself, Duckie,
you're really quite lucky!
Some people are much more...
oh, ever so much more...
oh, muchly much-much more
unlucky than you!
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Laughter comes out of health. It’s an overflowing energy. A sad child means an ill child, and a laughing old man means he is still young. Even death cannot make him old, nothing can make him old. His energy is still flowing and overflowing, he is always flooded. Laughter is a flooding of energy. My emphasis is to increase your cheerfulness, your laughter, because this world is not for the miserable. This world is not for the people who have become too accustomed to anxiety, anguish. This world belongs to those who live moment to moment in utter ecstasy. Cheerfulness, nonseriousness, a sense of humor to me are very fundamental qualities of a religious being. If we can fill the whole earth with laughter, with dancing and singing — people singing and swinging! — if we can make the earth a carnival of joy, a festival of lights, we will have brought for the first time a true sense of religiousness to the earth.
That’s why children can laugh and their laughter is total.
Their whole body is involved in it — when they laugh you
can see their toes laughing. The whole body, every cell,
every fiber of the body, is laughing and vibrating.
They are so full of health, so vital; everything is flowing.
Osho
Osho
Osho
Osho
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions--
the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile,
a kind look, a heart-felt compliment, and the countless
infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we
are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite
of ourselves.
Victor Hugo
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Smiles
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Smile a little, smile a little,
As you go along,
Not alone when life is pleasant,
But when things go wrong.
Care delights to see you frowning,
Loves to hear you sigh;
Turn a smiling face upon her,
Quick the dame will fly.
Smile a little, smile a little,
All along the road;
Every life must have its burden,
Every heart its load.
Why sit down in gloom and darkness,
With your grief to sup?
As you drink Fate's bitter tonic
Smile across the cup.
Smile upon the troubled pilgrims
Whom you pass and meet;
Frowns are thorns, and smiles are blossoms
Oft for weary feet.
Do not make the way seem harder
By a sullen face,
Smile a little, smile a little,
Brighten up the place.
Smile upon your undone labor;
Not for one who grieves
O'er his task, waits wealth or glory;
He who smiles achieves.
Though you meet with loss and sorrow
In the passing years,
Smile a little, smile a little,
Even through your tears.
Monday, March 19, 2012
There is a form of laughter that springs from the heart,
heard every day in the merry voice of childhood,
the expression of a laughter -- loving spirit that defies
analysis by the philosopher, which has nothing rigid or
mechanical in it, and totally without social significance.
Bubbling spontaneously from the heart of child or man.
William Osler
Whence I come or whither I go,
I little question, for well I know
What I am, 't is joy to be;
Laughter is my vesture,
And a god of revelry
Beckons in my gesture.
William Bull Wright
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
August Johann Holmberg painting
Not what you have, but what you see; Not what you see,
but what you choose; Not what seems fair, but what
is true; Not what you dream, but what you do;
Not what you take, but what you give;
Not as you pray, but as you live.
These are the things that mar or bless
The sum of human happiness.
Unknown Source
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease
worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus
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