The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

Even paranoids have real enemies.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.

I think that success is having fun.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

I feel matured in a way that I’m happy about. I’m at this other stage in my life – and it’s not a bad thing at all.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

The darkness, the loop of negative thoughts on repeat, clamours and interferes with the music I hear in my head.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

I like to let things breathe.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

I’m going to stay active as long as I can politically, and with the Carter Center primarily, and if I’m able mentally and physically, will continue to be quite active.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

I don’t like being alone.

I always was a rich person because money’s not related to happiness.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

It’s not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Off with you! You’re a happy fellow, for you’ll give happiness and joy to many other people. There is nothing better or greater than that!

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

Taking in a baseball game on TV is also a big treat.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life – that is, to be happy.

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.

It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.