Quotes about happiness and joy
Here are 40 passages (out of 50) from classic authors that speak of happiness and joy, for example by William Blake, Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev.
We kept the passages whose text touches on the theme, starting with those where it comes up most. Each is given word for word, with its author, its work and the reference of the passage. To browse an author’s quotes, follow the name.
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“'I have no name; / I am but two days old.' / What shall I call thee? / 'I happy am, / Joy is my name.' / Sweet joy befall thee!”
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“Happy, happy, never-returning time of childhood! How can we help loving and dwelling upon its recollections? They cheer and elevate the soul, and become to one a source of higher joys.”
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“Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!”
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“Happiness! happiness! as long as life is not over, as long as we have the use of all our limbs, as long as we are going up, not down, hill!”
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“Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves; we are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like.”
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“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.”
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“Cheerfulness is a direct and immediate gain, the very coin, as it were, of happiness, and not, like all else, merely a cheque upon the bank; for it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment”
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“I see in the Grasshopper’s fiddle, the Tree-frog’s bagpipes and the cymbals of the Cacan but so many methods of expressing the joy of living, the universal joy which every animal species celebrates after its kind.”
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“I would always rather be happy than dignified”
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“We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose.”
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“What an immense happiness it is to love and be loved.”
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“Very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life.”
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“All great noise causes one to place happiness in the calm and the distance.”
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“My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?”
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“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
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“We must laugh before we are happy, or else we may die before ever having laughed at all.”
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“The tear of grief is but a diamond of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first.”
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“The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.”
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“How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last!”
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“But the sun stood up there--orange-coloured and happy--and put courage into the whole world.”
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“God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give them endless duration.”
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“Undistracted by any outside occupation, I was entirely absorbed in the joy of learning and understanding.”
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“Honourable industry travels the same road with duty; and Providence has closely linked both with happiness.”
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“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
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“Better, however, to be foolish with happiness than foolish with misfortune, better to dance awkwardly than walk lamely.”
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“Melancholy is a twilight state; suffering melts into it and becomes a sombre joy. Melancholy is the pleasure of being sad.”
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“You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again.”
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“We love much more warmly when we are looking forward to making somebody happy than we do half an hour after, when we have done it.”
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“As it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”
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“Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer’s evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.”
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“We have not to seek to make ourselves like our progenitors, but to strive to work out that species of greatness and happiness which is our own.”
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“Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow: / The year is going, let him go; / Ring out the false, ring in the true.”
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“They felt very happy; the sense of youth, health and life, of free eager onward motion, gained possession of both; it grew stronger every instant.”
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“The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one’s own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one’s self.”
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“It is the height of folly to refuse the present hour of happiness, or wantonly to spoil it by vexation at by-gones or uneasiness about what is to come.”
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“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?”
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“It seemed to us that we had brought to that wedding of Nature our own wedding, to that calm our calm, and to that bright light the bright light of happiness within us.”
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“What boundless joys are thine, O just Renown, Thou hope of Virtue, and her noblest crown! By thee the seeds of conscious worth are fir’d, Hero by hero, fame by fame inspir’d:”
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“O Heart, remember, vintages are lost If grapes do not for freezing night-dews wait. Think, while thou sunnest thyself in Joy’s estate, Mayhap thou canst not ripen without frost!”
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“We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.”