Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

I think that everybody needs four things in life. Everybody needs something to do regardless of age. Everybody needs someone to love. Everybody needs something to hope for, and, of course, everybody needs someone to believe in.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.

He who is contented is rich.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

‚Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

When there’s justice and change, you start to see the cleansing of the soul, and that is what I want for people, and I hope it’s okay for me to say those things.

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren’t dependent on Washington doing something different.

A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?

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.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.

I totally disagree with the view that the Tibet struggle will die, and there will be no hope for Tibet, after the Dalai Lama passes away.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

Right now I’m just delighted to be alive and to have had a nice long bath.

My faith helps me understand that circumstances don’t dictate my happiness, my inner peace.

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

Every human has four endowments – self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom… The power to choose, to respond, to change.

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

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

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

Constitutions should consist only of general provisions; the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent, and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.

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

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

In a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man.

The happy Union of these States is a wonder; their Constitution a miracle; their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world.

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.

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‚Well gee, let’s not mess this up.‘ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

The Bible says that as Christians we don’t grieve the same way people do who have no hope of eternity and of Heaven – but we still grieve.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

I’d like to think you don’t stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

He who has felt his own ruin will not imagine the case of any to be hopeless; nor will he think them too fallen to be worthy his regard.