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

Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in Happiness and Misery

When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.

Jonathan Swift, 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

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Aristotle, 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

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon, in Happiness and Misery

He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.

Mary Howitt, in Happiness and Misery

If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.

Elbert Hubbard, 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

It is not the bad times on which we should dwell, it is only poison to the mind and soul. We shall rise up after we fall, and continue to go on -- dwelling on the good, high-spirited times of our lives.

Austin Holmes, in Happiness and Misery

To live a perfect life, you must ask nothing, give nothing, and expect nothing.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Live each day as if it were the last day of your life, because so far, it is.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Nostalgia is the realization that things weren't as unbearable as they seemed at the time.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Living well is the best revenge.

George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, in Happiness and Misery

Misery is optional.

S. Gilmary Beagle, in Happiness and Misery

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate