Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

When I’m back in New York – and this is a terrible thing to complain about – I eat a lot more really, really good food than perhaps I’d like to. So many of my friends are really good chefs. It’s kind of like being in the Mafia.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.

I am just happy to be part of the Nike family.

People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.

You know, T can stand for anything. T stand for working hard. T stand for loving thy neighbor. T stand for feeding the hungry. T stand for just working, working, working, being happy on the set, you know, lifting everybody’s spirits. T stands for just a nice guy.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

I have this really high priority on happiness and finding something to be happy about.

Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Life is too short not to celebrate nice moments!

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.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

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

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

I still have my unemployment books and I remember when I worked for the sanitation department and the post office.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Life well spent is long.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God.

Happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

I’m happiest with my family around me.

I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by my friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s inviting disaster.

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Number of people have said to me, after hearing your thinking, their mind becomes much more happier.

If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

Friends applaud, the comedy is over.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.

I always wanted a family.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other’s well-being, is source of happiness.

Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.