Quotes about Happiness

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

The main objects of all science, the freedom and happiness of man. . . . [are] the sole objects of all legitimate government. (A plaque with this quotation, with the first phrase omitted, is in the stairwell of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.)

The care of human life and happiness, and their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of a good government.

Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.

It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Perceiving the order of nature to be that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue, I am willing to hope it may have ordained that the fall of the wicked shall be the rise of the good. To J. Correa de Serra, Monticello, Apr. 19, 1814

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family

If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.