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

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

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

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

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

The gods too are fond of a joke.

Aristotle, 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

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

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Peter Ustinov, in Happiness and Misery

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

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

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant, in Happiness and Misery

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

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

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

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, 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

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

John F. Kennedy, 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

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