Quotes: Happiness

This afternoon I did a little google search for quotes on happiness.  This search was mainly due to wanting to find a quote about the inability for an individual to be happy if s/he is basing happiness on another person. This is something that I think is especially important in a functional marriage--that each partner within the couple needs to have internal contentment and not expect his or her happiness to be derived solely by the presence of the other.  I definitely believe that our partners influence our happiness, but it is our own individual perceptions and interpretations of life that allow us to be happy. While I didn't find the exact quote I was looking for, I found a lot of other quotes that I thought were wonderful and relevant to my reason for beginning the search.  So I thought that I would share some of them here.  Most of these were taken from: http://www.quotegarden.com/happiness.html

If you want to be happy, be. ~Leo Tolstoy

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. ~Benjamin Franklin

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. ~Frederick Keonig

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery while on a detour. ~Author Unknown

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone. ~Sigmund Freud

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment. ~Doug Larson

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. ~Iris Murdoch

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. ~Joseph Addison

To be obliged to beg our daily happiness from others bespeaks a more lamentable poverty than that of him who begs his daily bread. ~Charles Caleb Colton

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things. ~Epictetus

Some pursue happiness, others create it. ~Author Unknown

You need to learn to be happy by nature, because you'll seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance. ~Lavetta Sue Wegman