Happiness and Misery

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.

Arthur Somers Roche, in Happiness and Misery

The surest way of severely upsetting yourself for hours is by continuing to consider what concerns you most for a single moment too long.

Christopher Spranger, The Effort to Fall, in Happiness and Misery

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.

Bessie Stanley, in Happiness and Misery and Success and Failure

Be good and you will be lonesome.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator, in Happiness and Misery and Vice and Virtue

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in Happiness and Misery

I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

Carl Sandburg, in Happiness and Misery

Man is only happy as he finds a work worth doing, and does it well.

E. Merrill Root, in Happiness and Misery and Work and Recreation

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Eleanor Roosevelt, in Happiness and Misery

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

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

Jean Paul Richter, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

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

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

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

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

Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.

Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book, in Happiness and Misery

Learn not only to find what you like, learn to like what you find.

Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book, in Happiness and Misery

If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.

Anthony J. D'Angelo, The College Blue Book, in Happiness and Misery

Harmony seldom makes a headline.

Silas Bent, in Happiness and Misery