“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.” – Robert Anthony
Finding Happiness in life is essential, and these quotes can help.
According to the book The How of Happiness by researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, around 40 percent of our happiness is under our control.
As we age and our lives become more complex, we start to define being happy in more complicated terms. It all becomes one big balancing act between relationships, family, careers, goals, health, finances etc. It isn’t easy to do but staying postive and motivatived are essential on that journey. For that reason, these quotes on being happy should motivate on your own pursuit of happiness.
These are 101 of the most inspiring, uplifting and useful sayings we’ve found about happiness, with one quote for each day as a way to start fresh each morning.
Try it for the next 101 days and let us know how it helped.
101 Quotes on being happy for the next 101 days:
Day 1: “Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – Buddha
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Day 2: “Happiness is the art of never holding in your mind the memory of any unpleasant thing that has passed.”
Unknown
Day 3: Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened. – Dr. Seuss
Day 4: Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions. – Dalai Lama
Day 5: Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything, I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness. – Roberstons Davies
What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness | Robert Waldinger | TED Talks
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Day 6: “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
Epictetus
Day 7: Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning
of happiness or gone stark raving mad. – Norm Paernick
Day 8: Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it. – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Day 9: Happiness is never stopping to think if you are. – Palmer Sondreal
Day 10: Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. – Dalai Lama
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Day 11: “Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” – Winnie the Pooh
Day 12: People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway. – Mother Teresa
Day 13: For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Day 14: Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end
of human existence. – Aristotle
Day 15: “It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.” – Lucille Ball
How much control do you really have over your happiness, and how effectively are you pursuing it? American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks distills 40 years of social science research into a surprising set of answers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDH4mzsQP0w
Day 16: I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve. – Jane Austen
Day 17: I’d far rather be happy than right any day. – Douglas Adams
Day 18: Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek the happiness of others. – Martin Luther King Jr.
Day 19: The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances. – Martha Washington
Day 20: Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. – Robert A. Heinlein
Day 21: I’ve always thought people would find more pleasure in their routines if they would burst into song at significant moments. – John Barrowman
Day 22: All who would win must share it—happiness was born a twin. – George Gordon Byron
Day 23: A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my happiness. – Leo Tolstoy
Day 24: It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about. – Dale Carnegie
Day 25: Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it. – Andy Rooney
Day 26: Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure. – Arthur Schopenhauer
Day 27: It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. – Lucille Ball
Day 28: “If you want happiness for an hour — take a nap.’ If you want happiness for a day — go fishing. If you want happiness for a year — inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime — help someone else.” – Chinese Proverb
Day 29: The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate. – Oprah Winfrey
Day 30: Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. – Martha Troly Curtin
Day 31: Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called,
‘All the things that could go wrong.’ – Marianne Williamson
Day 32: The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely. – Louisa May Alcott
Day 33: A thing of beauty is a joy forever. – John Keats
Day 34: What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again. – Anais Nin
Day 35: Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well lived. – Eleanor Roosevelt
http://www.ted.com Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned
Day 36: Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. – Daphne du Maurier
Day 37: I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder. – David Thoreau
Day 38: They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for. – Tom Bodett
Day 39: This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. – Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Day 40: People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be. – Abraham Lincoln
Day 41: After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn’t bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we’re doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony. – Paulo Coelho
Day 42: Be believing, be happy, don’t get discouraged. Things will work out. – Gordon B. Hinckley
Day 43: I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more
than pride. – Alexandre Dumas
Day 44: The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. – Grahame Greene
Day 45: “Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self-worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself – no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are – completely; the good and the bad – and make changes as YOU see fit – not because you think someone else wants you to be different.” – Stacey Charter
Day 46: No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question caries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy. – Paulo Coelho
Day 47: Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it right. – Sarah Addison.
Day 48: It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything. – Alexander McCall Smith
Day 49: Memory is the happiness of being alone. – Louis Lowry
Day 50: It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace. – Chuck Palahniuk
Day 51: Right in this moment, I can’t even remember what unhappy feels like. – Maggie Steifvater
Day 52: Fathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing? – Jonathan Safran Foer
Day 53: My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own
goal. It is its own purpose. – Ayn Rand
Day 54: Woman is not made to be the admiration of all, but the happiness of one. – Edmund Burke
Day 55: Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living. – Mark Twain
Day 56: You have to participate relentless in the manifestation of your own blessings. – Elizabeth Gilbert
Day 57: We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same. – Anne Frank
Day 58: It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means “ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue,” and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase “root beer float” without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it. – Lemony Snicket
Day 59: People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly. – Elizabeth Gilbert
Day 60: Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. – Mahatma Ghandi
Day 61: Maybe happiness didn’t have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.
Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said “Walk” the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.
Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek.
Maybe it didn’t matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for. – Ann Brashares
Day 62: I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I’m not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I’m not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. – Dalai Lama XIV
Day 63: The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pendants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. – Ursula K Le Guin
Day 64: Sometimes life knocks you on your ass…get up, get up, get up!! Happiness is not the absence of problems. It’s the ability to deal with them. – Steve Maraboli
Day 65: There is some kind of sweet innocence to being human—in not having to be just happy or sad—in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time. – C. Joybell C.
Day 66: And I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight. – J.D. Salinger
Day 67: Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. – William James
Day 68: This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy. – Susan Polis SChutz
Day 69: There you go…let it all slide out. Unhappiness can’t stick in a person’s soul when it’s slick with tears. – Shannon Hale
Day 70: Seven Deadly Sins
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice.
– Mahatma Ghandi
Day 71: “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” – Albert Camus
Day 72: Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Day 73: Happiness. Simple as glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive. – Joanne Harris
Day 74: Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek. – Dalai Lama XIV
Day 75: She had never imagined she had the power to make someone else so happy. And not a magical power, either—a purely human one. – Cassandra Clare
Day 76: All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. – Conan O’Brien
Day 77: Expectations make people miserable, so whatever yours are, lower
them. You’ll definitely be happier. – Simon Elkeles
Day 78: I don’t know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn’t make you happy. – J.D. Salinger
Day 79: You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you. – Mary Tyler Moore
Day 80: It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about. – Dale CarnegieDay 80: It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about. – Dale Carnegie
Day 81: To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness—though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless. – Julian Barnes
Day 82: One is happy as a result of one’s efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience. – George Sand
Day 83: There are random moments – tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children’s rooms – when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead. – Elizabeth Berg
Day 84: The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does. – J.M. Barrie
Day 85: Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy. – Leo Tolstoy
Day 86: Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have. – Doris Mortman
Day 87: I keep remembering one of my Guru’s teachings about happiness. She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t you will eat away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments. – Elizabeth Gilbert from Eat, Pray, Love
Day 88: You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in… – Nick Hornby
Day 89: Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once. – Cornelia Funke
Day 90: You will never be happy if you continue to search for happiness. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. – Albert Camus
Day 91: A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. – Jane Austen
Day 92: The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. – Ashley Montagu
Day 93: – The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal. – C.S. Lewis
Day 94: Happy girls are the prettiest. – Audrey Hepburn
Day 95: There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. – Charlotte Bronte
Day 96: Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star. – Laini Taylor
Day 97: Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot. – Aristotle
Day 98: Many people think excitement is happiness…But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Day 99: We’re all golden sunflowers inside. – Allen Ginsberg
Day 100: There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality. – Seneca
Day 101: If you want to be happy, be. – Leo Tolstoy
