Happiness and Misery

Living well is the best revenge.

George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum, 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

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

Henry David Thoreau, 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

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

Bessie Stanley, in Happiness and Misery and Success and Failure

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain, in Happiness and Misery

Don't do whatever you like -- like whatever you do.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery and Work and Recreation

Even the the most tempting rose has thorns.

Tristan Eggener, in Happiness and Misery

Trouble is part of your life -- if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.

Dinah Shore, in Happiness and Misery

Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation.

George Bernard Shaw, in Happiness and Misery and Wealth and Poverty

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

George Bernard Shaw, in Happiness and Misery

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.

William Shakespeare, in Happiness and Misery

Do not scorn the person who is perpetually happy. He does know something you don't.

Paul Jones, in Happiness and Misery

Anxiety is interest paid on trouble before it is due.

Dean Inge, in Happiness and Misery

It is by fighting and triumphing over the enemies of the Buddha that we ourselves become Buddhas.

Daisaku Ikeda, (World Tribune, Oct. 29, 1999, p. 5), in Happiness and Misery and Science and Religion