How to Find True Happiness: Quotes about Happiness and Contentment

Hold him alone truly fortunate who has ended his life in happy well-being. - Aeschylus

My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it. – Charles Lamb

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less upon their dispositions than on their fortunes. – Francois dela Rochefoucauld

True contentment depends not upon what we have— a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander. – Charles Caleb Colton

Who is rich?—He that is content. – Benjamin Franklin

What is given by the gods more desirable than a happy hour? - Catullus

Drink and dance and laugh and lie,

Love the reeling midnight through,

For tomorrow we shall die (but alas we never do!) – Dorothy Parker

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. – Psalms 30:05

Happiness is the shadow of things past, which fools still take for that which is to be! – Francis Thompson

Often the greatest enemy of present happiness is past happiness too well remembered. – Oscar Hammling

And there is even a happiness,

That makes the heart afraid. – Thomas Hood

Oh how bitter a thing it is, to look into happiness through another man’s eyes. – Shakespeare

He is happiest of whom the world says least…good or bad. – Thomas Jefferson

Happiness sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open. – John Barrymore

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. – Robert Frost

To find out what one is fitted to do and to secure an opportunity to do is the key to happiness. – John Dewey

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. – Victor Hugo

Joy rises in me like a summer’s morn. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The sun and stars that float in the open air,

The apple-shaped earth, and we, upon it—

Surely the drift of them is something grand…

I do not know what it is, except that it is grand,

And that it is happiness. – Walt Whitman

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions—the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In order to be happy oneself, it is necessary to make at least one other person happy…The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting. – Theodore Reik

A joy that’s shared is a joy made double. – John Ray

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment, which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things. - Aristotle

You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it all. – Horace

One should be either sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers. – Eugene Gladstone O’Neill

I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. – Hebrews 4:11

I am always content with what happens, for I know that what God chooses is better than what I choose. – Epictetus

Be content with your lot; One cannot be first in everything. – Aesop

No man is happy who does not think himself so. – Marcus Aurelius