Happiness and Misery

Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves for we shall never cease to be amused.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Aristotle, in Happiness and Misery

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

Francis Bacon, in Happiness and Misery

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

Aesop, in Happiness and Misery and Success and Failure

Comedy is tragedy plus time.

Carol Burnett, in Happiness and Misery

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

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

In life, we are all in the gutter. Some of us just tend to look up at the stars.

Oscar Wilde, in Happiness and Misery

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov, in Happiness and Misery

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, in Happiness and Misery

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

So go for the jump, and chase all your dreams.

Mark van Essen, (from a lyric written for Bruce Springsteen), in Happiness and Misery

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

Voltaire, in Happiness and Misery

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.

Joe Walsh, 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

Life is short. Live it up.

Nikita Khrushchev, (New York Times Magazine, August 3, 1958), in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

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

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