| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
|---|
| It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive. | W. Somerset Maugham | The Moon and Sixpence |  |
| Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning him-self to let it eat him away. | Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | |
| "I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!" | Charles Dickens | A Christmas Carol | |
| I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. | Ayn Rand | Anthem | |
| To see their sons and daughters so flushed and healthy and happy, gave them also a reflected glow, and it was hard to say who had most pleasure from the game, those who played or those who watched. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Beyond the City | |
| . . . she better liked to see him free and happy, even than to have him near her, because she loved him better than herself. | Charles Dickens | Barnaby Rudge | |
| They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. | Edith Wharton | Ethan Frome | |
| "I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world." | L. Frank Baum | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | |
| "I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart." | L. Frank Baum | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | |
| Being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her. | Charles Dickens | Bleak House | |
| It is only when we are very happy, that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys. | Baroness Emmuska Orczy | The Scarlet Pimpernel | |
| "Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!" | George Bernard Shaw | Pygmalion | |
| And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. | Thomas Hardy | The Mayor of Casterbridge | |
| A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity. | Thomas Hardy | Return of the Native | |
| No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato. | Charlotte Bronte | Villette | |
| "Action may not always be happiness," said the general; "but there is no happiness without action." | Benjamin Disraeli | Lothair | |
| "You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed." | Saki | The Chronicles of Clovis | |
| At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage. | Stephen Crane | The Red Badge of Courage | |
| "One gets a bad habit of being unhappy." | George Eliot | The Mill on the Floss | |
| He saw that men who worked hard, and earned their scanty bread with lives of labour, were cheerful and happy; and that to the most ignorant, the sweet face of Nature was a never-failing source of cheerfulness and joy. He saw those who had been delicately nurtured, and tenderly brought up, cheerful under privations, and superior to suffering, that would have crushed many of a rougher grain, because they bore within their own bosoms the materials of happiness, contentment, and peace. He saw that women, the tenderest and most fragile of all God's creatures, were the oftenest superior to sorrow, adversity, and distress; and he saw that it was because they bore, in their own hearts, an inexhaustible well-spring of affection and devotion. Above all, he saw that men like himself, who snarled at the mirth and cheerfulness of others, were the foulest weeds on the fair surface of the earth; and setting all the good of the world against the evil, he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all. | Charles Dickens | The Pickwick Papers | |
