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

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

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

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov, in Happiness and Misery

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

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

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

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Henry David Thoreau, 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

Sloppy, raggedy-assed old life. I love it. I never want to die.

Dennis Trudell, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

Be good and you will be lonesome.

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

If we couldn't laugh, we'd all go insane.

Jimmy Buffett, in Happiness and Misery

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

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

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Henry Louis Mencken, in Happiness and Misery

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.

John Stuart Mill, in Happiness and Misery

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

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

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