To be strong
Is to be happy! [ Longfellow ]
A happy accident. [ Mme. De Stael ]
He who is good is happy. [ Habbington ]
By many a happy accident. [ Thomas Middleton ]
Ah! how happy the dead are! [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Be happy, but be so by piety. [ Mme. de Stael ]
A happy soul, that all the way
To heaven hath a summer's day. [ Richard Crashaw ]
Riches alone make no men happy. [ Proverb ]
Happy love counts lost moments. [ Diderot ]
Sweet sleep, with soft down
Weave thy brows an infant crown!
Sweet sleep, angel mild,
Hover over my happy child. [ William Blake ]
Happy is he that serves the happy. [ Proverb ]
Happy is he that chastens himself. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
Not every one who dances is happy. [ French Proverb ]
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground. [ Pope ]
Rise, happy morn! rise, holy morn! [ Tennyson ]
Happy men shall have many friends. [ Proverb ]
How happy is he born or taught,
That serveth not another's will;
Whose armor is his honest thought
And simple truth his utmost skill! [ Sir Henry Wotton ]
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow! [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Though stars in skies may disappear,
And angry tempests gather,
The happy hour may soon be near
That brings us pleasant weather. [ Burns ]
It is not good to be happy too young. [ Proverb ]
Welcome as happy tidings after fears. [ Otway ]
Oh, happy vantage of a kneeling knee! [ William Shakespeare ]
Happy were men if they but understood
There is no safety but in doing good. [ John Fountain ]
A happy genius is the gift of nature. [ Dryden ]
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance. [ Tennyson ]
The most happy ought to wish for death. [ Seneca ]
Let cheerfulness on happy fortune wait. [ Dryden ]
Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells; hail, horrors! [ Milton ]
Unequal marriages are seldom happy ones. [ Proverb ]
Happy that I can
Be crossed and thwarted as a man,
Not left in God's contempt apart,
With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart,
Tame in earth's paddock, as her prize. [ Browning ]
Happy opinions are the wine of the heart. [ Leigh Hunt ]
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. [ Tennyson ]
O happy earth.
Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread! [ Spenser ]
Happy the man who sees a God employed
In all the good and ill that chequer life! [ Cowper ]
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot. [ Pope ]
Happy is he that is happy in his children. [ Proverb ]
It is the mind that maketh good or ill.
That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor. [ Spenser ]
The dream
Dreamed by a happy man, when the dark east,
Unseen, is brightening to his bridal morn. [ Tennyson ]
Oh! I have pass'd a miserable night.
So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.
That, as I am a Christian faithful man,
I would not spend another such a night
Though 'twere to buy a world of happy days. [ William Shakespeare ]
Dispel not the happy delusions of children. [ Goethe ]
No one is happy unless he respects himself. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
He is happy who is forsaken by his passions. [ Hitopadesa ]
Memory, and thou, Forgetfulness, not yet
Your powers in happy harmony I find;
One oft recalls what I would fain forget,
And one blots out what I would bear in mind. [ Macedonius ]
Happy who in his verse can gently steer,
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe. [ John Dryden ]
None are happy but by anticipation of change. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Live long and happy, and in that thought die;
Glad for what was. [ Robert Browning ]
Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive through a happy place. [ Wordsworth ]
Better the heart happy than the purse (full). [ Italian Proverb ]
The world boasts that it can render men happy! [ Massillon ]
The learned is happy nature to explore,
The fool is happy that he knows no more;
The rich is happy in the plenty given.
The poor contents him with the care of Heaven. [ Pope ]
Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. [ Dryden, after Horace ]
See the enfranchised bird, who wildly springs,
With a keen sparkle in his glowing eye
And a strong effort in his quivering wings,
Up to the blue vault of the happy sky. [ Mrs. Norton ]
Greatness, with private men
Esteem'd a blessing, is to me a curse;
And we, whom from our high births they conclude
The only free men, are the only slaves:
Happy the golden mean. [ Massinger ]
Happy is he whose friends were born before him. [ Proverb ]
Happy is the man whose father went to the devil. [ Proverb ]
No one can be said to be happy until he is dead. [ Solon ]
We take less pains to be happy than to appear so. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Happy is he who hath sowed his wild oats betimes. [ Proverb ]
To be happy is not to enjoy: it is not to suffer. [ Raspail ]
How happy is he that owes nothing but to himself! [ Proverb ]
To be secure, be humble. To be happy, be content. [ James Hurdts ]
The loveliest flowers the closest cling to earth,
And they first feel the sun: so violets blue;
So the soft star-like primrose - drenched in dew -
The happiest of spring's happy, fragrant birth. [ Keble ]
Happy is the child whose father went to the devil. [ Proverb ]
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy! [ Byron ]
O happy unowned youths! your limbs can bear
The scorching dog-star and the winter's air,
While the rich infant, nursed with care and pain,
Thirsts with each heat and coughs with every rain! [ Gay ]
The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
Happy is the man who sees his faults in his youth. [ Proverb ]
Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not still thou striv'st to get,
And what thou hast, forgett'st. [ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure ]
Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
We are never as happy, nor as unhappy, as we fancy. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
It is comparison that makes men happy or miserable. [ Proverb ]
One always wishes to be happy before becoming wise. [ Mme. Necker ]
He is happy that knows not himself to be otherwise. [ Proverb ]
The sweet forget-me-nots that grow for happy lovers. [ Tennyson ]
Friendship makes more happy marriages than love does.
Oh, that I were as happy as I am clear in conscience. [ Ovid ]
Wisdom never contemplates what will make a happy man. [ Aristotle ]
Merit is born with men; happy those with whom it dies! [ Queen Christina ]
The present is never a happy state to any human being; [ Dr. Johnson ]
When a man is happy he does not hear the clock strike. [ German Proverb ]
A sleeping beggar is just as happy as a sleeping king. [ J. Linen ]
O Life, an age to the miserable, a moment to the happy. [ Bacon ]
How short our happy days appear! How long the sorrowful! [ Jean Ingelow ]
One cannot be fully happy until after his sixtieth year. [ Bonstetten ]
The daisies' eyes are a-twinkle with happy tears of dew. [ Fitz-Hugh Ludlow ]
We are no longer happy, so soon as we wish to be happier. [ Walter Savage Landor ]
He is the happiest who renders the greatest number happy. [ Desmakis ]
Music, rather than poetry, should be called the happy art.
[ Richter ]
No person is either so happy or so unhappy as he imagines. [ La Roche ]
Happy is the man whose enemies have been in small matters. [ Proverb ]
In my dominions every one may be happy in his own fashion. [ Frederick the Great ]
I myself had been happy, if I had been unfortunate in time. [ Proverb ]
No one should be called happy before he is dead and buried. [ Ovid ]
O, happy youth! for whom thy fate reserved so fair a bride. [ Dryden ]
Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched. [ Proverb ]
The first step toward happiness is to determine to be happy. [ George Hodges ]
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike.
We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are. [ Balzac ]
We are never so happy, or unfortunate, as we think ourselves. [ Proverb ]
If she be not honest, chaste, and true, there's no man happy. [ William Shakespeare ]
True blessedness consisteth in a good life and a happy death.
To be happy, one must ask neither the how nor the why of life.
How difficult a thing it is, to persuade most men to be happy! [ Proverb ]
Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things. [ Virgil ]
Happy he whose last hour strikes in the midst of his children. [ Grillparzer ]
Hail, Columbia! happy land! Hail, ye heroes! heaven-born band!
Who fought and bled in Freedom's cause. [ Joseph Hopkinson ]
We are never happy: we can only remember that we were so once. [ Alexander Smith ]
Doing good is the only certainly happy action of a man's life. [ Sir P. Sidney ]
To what happy accident is it that we owe so unexpected a visit? [ Goldsmith ]
Happy, indeed, the man who can say that he owes no man anything. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]
To be happy is not to possess much, but to hope and to love much. [ Lamennais ]
It is the riches of the mind only that make a man rich and happy. [ Proverb ]
Happy are they who can create a rose-tree, or erect a honeysuckle. [ Gray ]
If you can be well without health, you maybe happy without virtue. [ Proverb ]
Death! to the happy thou art terrible;
But how the wretched love to think of thee,
O thou true comforter! the friend of all Who have no friend beside! [ Southey ]
May it please God not to make our friends so happy as to forget us. [ Proverb ]
A man may be happy here and hereafter, without much fame or wealth. [ Proverb ]
How many could be made happy with the happiness lost in this world. [ Levis ]
Life that is too short for the happy, is too long for the miserable. [ Proverb ]
Live only in a great Today, whose happy thoughts weave golden hours. [ Josephine Rollett Wright ]
An happy man shall have more cousins, than his father had kinsfolks. [ Proverb ]
He gains wisdom in a happy way who gains it by another's experience. [ Plautus ]
What can the Creator see with greater pleasure than a happy creature? [ Lessing ]
While our hearts are pure, our lives are happy and our peace is sure. [ William Winter ]
Job was not so miserable in his sufferings, as happy in his patience. [ Proverb ]
We are never so happy, nor so unhappy, as we suppose ourselves to be. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world. [ Froude ]
To be happy is not the purpose of our being, but to deserve happiness. [ Fichte ]
A happy union with wife and child is like the music of lutes and harps. [ Confucius ]
Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life. [ William Ellery Channing ]
It is the enjoying, and not merely the possessing, that makes us happy. [ Montaigne ]
There is no bitterer grief than a happy remembrance in a day of sorrow. [ A. de Musset ]
To give pain is the tyranny, - to make happy the true empire of beauty. [ Steele ]
Use, do not abuse: neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy. [ Voltaire ]
To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us. [ Hazlitt ]
There are people who are almost in love, almost famous, and almost happy. [ Mme. de Krudener ]
One can be very happy without demanding that others should agree with one. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
As a wise child makes a happy father, so a wise father makes a happy child. [ Proverb ]
Peace is the happy, natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace. [ Thomson ]
To render a marriage happy, the husband should be deaf and the woman blind. [ Proverb ]
There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life could he find it. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
So long as you do not quarrel with sin, you will never be a truly happy man. [ J. C. Ryle ]
He may rate himself a happy man who lives remote from the gods of this world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
We must laugh before we are happy, lest we should die without having laughed. [ La Bruyere ]
The world forgives with difficulty the fact that one can be happy without it.
The only happy author in this world fs he who is below the care of reputation. [ Washington Irving ]
Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good. [ Landor ]
The world has grown suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
Better is an error that makes us happy than a truth that plunges us into despair.
Happy he who finds a friend; without that second self one lives but half of life. [ Chenedolle ]
Happy the man who sees a God employed in all the good and ills that checker life. [ Cowper ]
No man can be good, or great, or happy, except through inward efforts of his own. [ F. W. Robertson ]
If a man is unhappy, this must be his own fault; for God made all men to be happy. [ Epictetus ]
Nature has granted to all to be happy, if we did but know how to use her benefits. [ Claudian ]
No man can be happy without a friend, nor be sure of his friend till he is unhappy. [ Proverb ]
Happy he that can abandon everything by which his conscience is defiled or burdened. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
A happy jest often gives birth to another; but the child is seldom worth the mother. [ Alfred Bougeart ]
To be happy, there are certain sides of our nature that must be entirely stultified. [ Chamfort ]
He who is virtuous is wise; and he who is wise is good; and he who is good is happy. [ King Alfred's Boethius ]
If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve happiness. [ Fichte ]
Happy is he who soon discovers the chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Who would with care some happy fiction frame, so mimics truth it looks the very same. [ Granville ]
One year of joy, another of comfort, the rest of content, make the married life happy. [ Proverb ]
A happy recollection is perhaps in this world more real than the happiness it recalls. [ French ]
Happy is she that from the world retires, and carries with her what the world admires. [ Waller ]
How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]
The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our duty and find in it our pleasure. [ Mme. de Motteville ]
Happy is the man who reverences all women because he first learned to worship his mother. [ Richter ]
Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy if I could say how much. [ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing ]
A man may as well expect to be well, and at ease without wealth, as happy without virtue. [ Proverb ]
Happy he for whom a kind heavenly sun brightens the ring of necessity into a ring of duty. [ Carlyle ]
At the bottom of the faith-sea lies the pearl of knowledge; happy the diver that finds it. [ Bodenstedt ]
Happy is that house and blessed is that congregation where Martha still complains of Mary. [ S. Bern ]
The best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible today. [ Charles William Eliot ]
The second childhood of a saint is the early infancy of a happy immortality, as we believe. [ Wm. Mountford ]
Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral. [ Ovid ]
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. [ Locke ]
Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
If they are superficial, so are the dewdrops, which give such a depth to the morning meadow. [ Emerson ]
He that upon a true principle lives, without any disquiet of thought, may be said to be happy. [ L'Estrange ]
Women have become so highly educated that nothing should surprise them except happy marriages. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
A happy marriage is a new beginning of life, a new starting-point for happiness and usefulness. [ Dean Stanley ]
The acclaim of a happy people is the only eloquence which ought to speak in the behalf of kings.
Covetousness, like a candle ill made, smothers the splendor of a happy fortune in its own grease. [ F. Osborn ]
Be happy if you can, but do not despise those who are otherwise, for you know not their troubles.
The man of meditation is happy, not for an hour or a day, but quite round the circle of his years. [ Isaac Taylor ]
Happy it were for us all if we bore prosperity as well and as wisely as we endure adverse fortune. [ Southey ]
When I was happy I thought I knew men, but it was fated that I should know them in misfortune only. [ Napoleon ]
The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy. [ Seneca ]
That state of life is most happy where superfluities are not required and necessaries are not wanting. [ Plutarch ]
We take greater pains to persuade others that we are happy than in endeavouring to think so ourselves. [ Confucius ]
If you will learn the seriousness of life, and its beauty also, live for your husband; make him happy. [ Fredrika Bremer ]
To die, I own, is a dread passage - terrible to nature, chiefly to those who have, like me, been happy. [ Thomson ]
The presence of the wretched is a burden to the happy; and alas! the happy still more so to the wretched. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The best government is not that which renders men the happiest, but that which renders the greatest number happy. [ Charles P. Duclos ]
Men are in general so tricky, so envious, and so cruel, that when we find one who is only weak, we are too happy. [ Voltaire ]
Happy is the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it. [ Hare ]
It is no happiness to live long, nor unhappiness to die soon; happy is he that hath lived long enough to die well. [ Quarles ]
Every man has in himself a continent of undiscovered character. Happy is he who acts the Columbus to his own soul. [ Sir J. Stevens ]
Enthusiasm imparts itself magnetically, and fuses all into one happy and harmonious unity of feeling and sentiment. [ A. B. Alcott ]
All musical people seem to be happy. It is the engrossing pursuit - almost the only innocent and unpunished passion. [ Sydney Smith ]
We deem those happy who, from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills, without being overcome by them. [ Juvenal ]
Happy that heart in which no more idols are to be found, but the holy God dwelling there alone as in His holy temple. [ R. Leighton ]
He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances. [ Hare ]
In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy dying, in which human happiness consists. [ Montaigne ]
We deem those happy who, from their experience of life, have learned to bear its ills without descanting on the burden. [ Juv ]
The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. [ Swift ]
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable; for the happy impute all their successes to prudence and merit. [ Swift ]
A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities. [ F. W. Robertson ]
Her deep blue eyes smile constantly, as if they had by fitness won the secret of a happy dream she does not care to speak. [ Mrs. Browning ]
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. [ Hawthorne ]
There is but one solid basis of happiness, and that is the reasonable hope of a happy futurity. This may be had everywhere. [ Johnson ]
The last day must always be awaited by man, and no man should be pronounced happy before his death and his final obsequies. [ Ovid ]
Men live best upon a little; Nature has given to all the privilege of being happy, if they but knew how to use their gifts. [ Claudianus ]
Misfortunes, in fine, cannot be avoided; but they may be sweetened, if not overcome, and our lives made happy by philosophy. [ Seneca ]
What we have pleases us if we do not compare it with what others have; he never will be happy to whom a happier is a torture. [ Seneca ]
Happy child! the cradle is still to thee a vast space; but when thou art a man the boundless world will be too small for thee. [ Schiller ]
Degrees of happiness vary according to the degrees of virtue, and consequently, that life which is most virtuous is most happy. [ Norris ]
Happy the man to whom Heaven has given a morsel of bread without his being obliged to thank any other for it than Heaven itself. [ Cervantes ]
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know. [ John Ruskin ]
There is an exchange of thought and feeling which is happy alike in speech and in silence. It is quietness pervaded with friendship. [ Henry van Dyke ]
I hope you are becoming more and more interested in making those around you happy. That is the true way to secure your own happiness. [ Robert E. Lee ]
It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables, and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. [ Ouida ]
Happy child! the cradle is still to thee an infinite space; once grown into a man, and the boundless world will be too small to thee. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Happiness is in taste and not in things; and it is by having what we love that we are happy, not by having what others find agreeable. [ Rochefoucauld ]
If my heart were as poor as my understanding, I should be happy; for I am thoroughly persuaded that such poverty is a means of salvation. [ Pascal ]
It is the mind that makes us rich and happy, in what condition soever we are, and money signifies no more to it than it does to the gods. [ Seneca ]
Happy is it to place a daughter; yet it pains a father's heart when he delivers to another's house a child, the object of his tender care. [ Euripides ]
Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. [ Ben. Franklin ]
In the career of female fame, there are few prizes to be obtained which can vie with the obscure state of a beloved wife or a happy mother. [ Jane Porter ]
We have the command, to a great extent, over our own lot. At all events, our mind is our own possession; we can cherish happy thoughts there. [ Samuel Smiles ]
You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who make people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, - by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]
The birds, great Nature's happy commoners, that haunt in woods, in meads, and flowery gardens, rifle the sweets and taste the choicest fruits. [ Rowe ]
He who has done the best he can, has a right to be as happy in the hope of ultimate triumph as though he was already enthroned amidst that triumph. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]
Happy is he to whom his business itself becomes a puppet, who at length can play with it, and amuse himself with what his situation makes his duty. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have the world proclaimeth, and what faults they commit the earth covereth. [ Quarles ]
How happy he who can still hope to lift himself from this sea of error! What we know not, that we are anxious to possess, and cannot use what we know. [ Goethe ]
The greatest and most amiable privilege which the rich enjoy over the poor is that which they exercise the least, - the privilege of making them happy. [ Colton ]
Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate fit to relish and taste them; it is fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy. [ Montaigne ]
Being happy - being appreciative, being grateful - is not altogether a matter of temperament. Nor is it dependent upon outward circumstances. Not at all. [ Ossian Lang ]
Happy is the man who can endure the highest and the lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power. [ Seneca ]
Thrice happy they, and more than thrice, whom an unbroken link binds together, and whom love, unimpaired by evil rancour, will not sunder before their last day. [ Horace ]
Happy the man who, remote from busy life, is content, like the primitive race of mortals, to plough his paternal lands with his own oxen, freed from all borrowing and lending. [ Horace ]
I long to believe in immortality. If I am destined to be happy with you here - how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality - I wish to live with you forever. [ Keats ]
Try to be happy in this present moment, and put not off being so to a time to come, - as though that time should be of another make from this, which has already come and is ours. [ Fuller ]
I have tormented the present with the preoccupations of the future; I have put my judgment in the place of Providence, and the happy child has been transformed into a care-worn man! [ E. Souvestre ]
He that always waits upon God is ready whenever He calls. Neglect not to set your accounts even; he is a happy man who so lives as that death at all times may find him at leisure to die. [ Owen Feltham ]
In designing a house and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily placed as to exhibit a view of the whole design. [ Shenstone ]
Happy contractedness of youth, nay, of mankind in general, that they think neither of the high nor the deep, of the true nor the false, but only of what is suited to their own conceptions. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
A friend is he who sets his heart upon us, is happy with us and delights in us; does for us what we want, is willing and fully engaged to do all he can for us, on whom we can rely in all cases. [ William Ellery Channing ]
I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Plutarch has a fine expression, with regard to some woman of learning humility, and virtue; - that her ornaments were such as might be purchased without money, and would render any woman's life both glorious and happy. [ Sterne ]
Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier, and the sacred air-castles of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality, and man by his nature is yet infinite and free. [ Carlyle ]
Happy men are full of the present, for its bounty suffices them; and wise men also, for its duties engage them. Our grand business undoubtedly is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. [ Thomas Carlyle ]
Darwin remarks that we are less dazzled by the light at waking, if we have been dreaming of visible objects. Happy are those who have here dreamt of a higher vision! They will the sooner be able to endure the glories of the world to come. [ Novalis ]
Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other - it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. [ Colton ]
The human mind, in proportion as it is deprived of external resources, sedulously labours to find within itself the means of happiness, learns to rely with confidence on its own exertions, and gains with greater certainty the power of being happy. [ Zimmermann ]
Perfect works are rare, because they must be produced at the happy moment when taste and genius unite: and this rare conjunction, like that of certain planets, appears to occur only after the revolution of several cycles, and only lasts for an instant. [ Chateaubriand ]
It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable. Let us begin where she begins, go her pace, and close always where she ends, and we cannot miss of being good naturalists. [ William Penn ]
Do not worry; eat three square meals a day; say your prayers; be courteous to your creditors; keep your digestion good ; exercise ; go slow and easy. Maybe there are other things that your special case requires to make you happy, but, my friend, these, I reckon, will give you a good lift. [ Abraham Lincoln ]
Love to make others happy; yes, surely at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of any life. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen creatures to wipe and set up.... In our life there is no meaning at all except the work we have done. [ Carlyle ]
The friendship of the world is like the leaves falling from their trees in autumn; while the sap of maintenance lasts, friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of our need, they leave us naked. He is a happy man that hath a true friend at his need; but he is more truly happy that hath no need of a friend. [ Arthur Warwick ]
Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority have the modesty not to talk; when they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous; but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects. [ Johnson ]
Music has certainly a powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately; but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. [ S. F. Bradford ]
The world produces for every pint of honey a gallon of gall, for every dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for every inch of mirth an ell of moan; and as the ivy twines around the oak, so does misery and misfortune encompass the happy man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed felicity, is not a plant of earthly growth: her gardens are the skies. [ Robert Burton ]
It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade, and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world. [ Novalis ]
Let the foundation of thy affection be virtue, then make the building as rich and as glorious as thou canst; if the foundation be beauty or wealth, and the building virtue, the foundation is too weak for the building, and it will fall: happy is he, the palace of whose affection is founded upon virtue, walled with riches, glazed with beauty, and roofed with honor. [ Quarles ]
A sense of humor is a saving grace, and happy is that woman who has been blessed by birth with that rare sixth sense of seeing the funny side.
If you have it naturally, be gladly grateful, for it is a greater gift than beauty or riches. It means cheerfulness, contentment, courage and, possessing it, you are equipped with a potent weapon against the blows of fate. [ Unknown ]
The man whose bosom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his torments under the friendly shade of every tree; and experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness. [ Zimmermann ]
There is scare any lot so low, but there is something in it to satisfy the man whom it has befallen, Providence having so ordered things, that in every man's cup how bitter soever, there are some cordial drops, some good circumstances, which if wisely extracted, are sufficient for the purpose he wants them, that is, to make him contented, and if not happy, at least resigned. [ Sterne ]
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians were reposing here as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard. [ Charles Lamb ]