Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
Denis Waitley

It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.
Denis Waitley

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.
Clara Barton

The greatest happiness comes from being vitally interested in something that excites all your energies.
Walter Annenberg

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.
John Ruskin

Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Pearl S. Buck

Money may not buy happiness, but it can damn well give it!
Freddie Mercury

No one is guaranteed happiness. You can pursue it, but if you happen to find success along the way on that road to happiness, Conservatives believe you should not be demonized or penalized for it.
Glenn Beck

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.
Alice Walker

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.
Henri Matisse

It is also rarer to find happiness in a man surrounded by the miracles of technology than among people living in the desert of the jungle and who by the standards set by our society would be considered destitute and out of touch.
Thor Heyerdahl

False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.
Charles de Montesquieu

When what we are is what we want to be, that's happiness.
Malcolm Forbes

The most worth-while thing is to try to put happiness into the lives of others.
Robert Baden-Powell

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
W. Somerset Maugham

You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.
Horace

Happiness is inward, and not outward; and so, it does not depend on what we have, but on what we are.
Henry Van Dyke