I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

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

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

There’s a part of you – the born-again part, your spirit – that’s dead to sin. That’s why it bothers you now when you sin. The ‚wilderness‘ part of you – your soul – is your unrenewed mind, out-of-control emotions, and stubborn will.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

If you like it you should enjoy it! Moderation in everything. If there’s things you really love, you should enjoy. You get one life, so you should enjoy it.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

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

I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.

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.

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?

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

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

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

It is important to remember yourself.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy.

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

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

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?

Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

I loved being Maleficent. I was quite sad to put my staff down and put my horns away because somehow, she just lives in a different world.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

I don’t think I get that upset over things.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.

Here comes 40. I’m feeling my age and I’ve ordered the Ferrari. I’m going to get the whole mid-life crisis package.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.

How happy had it been for me had I been slain in the battle. It had been far more noble to have died the victim of the enemy than fall a sacrifice to the rage of my friends.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly or at medium speed. I either do, or I don’t.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

When I wake up in the morning, I feel just like any other insecure 24-year-old girl.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.