Happiness & Flourishing

Let us not depend upon the world for pleasure.

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

In peace, prepare for war. In war, prepare for peace.

Sun Tzu The Art of War

We think a happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations

So the Church too, like Mary, enjoys perpetual virginity and uncorrupted fecundity.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions

As soon as the soul has been made to perceive that a thing can conduct it to that which it loves supremely, it must inevitably embrace it with joy.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Every pleasure defers to its last its greatest delights.

Seneca Moral Letters to Lucilius

Those of our pleasures which come most rarely give the greatest delight.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion

Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

Now men seem, not unreasonably, to form their notions of the supreme good and of happiness from the lives of men.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they are discontented.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

Perfect happiness is keeping yourself alive, and only actionless action can have this affect.

Zhuangzi Zhuangzi

For a noble disciple, O householder, who wishes to have long life, it is not befitting that he should pray for long life or take delight in so doing. He should rather follow a path of life that is conducive to longevity.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka

If you are wholly perplexed and in straits,have patience, for patience is the key to joy.

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus & Notebooks

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Baruch Spinoza Ethics (Ethica)

L'homme doit être content, dit-on; mais de quoi?

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

The happiness of men consists in life. And life is in labor.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

Haunted by a detached perspective, Shakespeare, at the close of his career within the Sandman universe, confesses to exploiting his own life's joys and tragedies for the sake of his art.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde De Profundis & Essays

I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series