When I was young my mom used to tell me the meaning of life was the pursuit of smiles. Now, all grown up, I can truly appreciate the sentiment behind those words.
For me it’s blue skies, good food, and good friends that make me smile. But to some, it may be scoring a goal, reading a book, or walking in the rain. Regardless of how it happens, I think we can all agree it’s just important that it does happen.
To help the cause we searched far and wide for our favorite smile producing quotes. These happiness quotes should both test your perceptions while inspiring you to new heights. We hope you enjoy!
What Makes You Smile?
The Best 101 Happiness Quotes
1. For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies. – Augusten Burroughs
3. Anyone who tells you money can’t buy happiness never had any. – Samuel L. Jackson
4. I don’t understand the point of being together if you’re not the happiest. – Gillian Flynn
5. Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent. – Alain de Botton
6. Success is meaningless without fulfilment – both begin within. – Rasheed Ogunlaru
7. The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy. – Arthur Schopenhauer
8. It’s simple; be YOU. If you’re not being you, you’re being someone else. YOU are not here to be someone else. – Steve Maraboli
9. To speak of happiness is to create happiness. – Marty Rubin
10. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures we weren’t willing to work for. – Mitch Albom
11. There’s little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing. –William Shakespeare
12. Unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories. – Jed Rubenfeld
13. If you cannot discover happiness, invent it. – Tasnim Nathoo
14. A flower blossoms for its own joy. – Oscar Wilde
15. You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will make others bless it–which is what matters most. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16. There I am, in the Grade Six class picture, smiling broadly. Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed. – Margaret Atwood
17. The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness. – Eric Hoffer
18. Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn’t it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away. – Nenia Campbell
19. Learning to appreciate the beauty that surrounds you is one of the keys to your happiness. – Tom Giaquinto
20. Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, and a good woman – or a bad woman; it depends on how much happiness you can handle. – George Burns
21. Sometimes, in order to find happiness, one must allow some old bridges to collapse, in order to build better ones. – Lionel Suggs
22. Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes. – Katherine Mansfield
23. When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come to peace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest! – Charles Dickens
24. A life devoted to seeking pleasure, is a life committed to being discontent. – David Guerrero
25. Once you’re truly happy with yourself alone, that’s when you are safe to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with. – Tyler Perry
26. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. – C.S. Lewis
27. Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone. – Saul Bellow
28. We don’t live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for. – George Mallory
29. There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time. – Edith Wharton
30. Happiness does not lie in amusement; it would be strange if one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one’s life in order to amuse oneself. – Aristotle
31. But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along. – Lauren Oliver
32. “I’ve learned that I don’t have to live in sadness – there’s not some cruel requirement that I should feel guilty about being happy. – Margaret Lesh
33. Helping others is the secret sauce to a happy life. – Todd Stocker
34. What tickles the soul makes all the world well again. – Leandra J. Kalsy
35. Happiness is the contentment in the heart, peace of mind, a sense of stability, a right attitude and being content with what is sufficient. – Moazzam Shaikh
36. Finally, when happiness came knocking on my door, I’d be waiting. I’d open the door and say: “Where have you been? What took you so long? And if you just give me a moment I’ll pack and go with you. – Constance Briscoe
37. I hope death will be a great happiness, a happiness as great as that of love, fulfilled love. – Hermann Hesse
38. Those who make happiness the chief objective of life are bound to fail, for happiness is a by-product rather than an end in itself. – Joseph B. Wirthlin
39. Postponing happiness until “all your ducks are in order” means never because life is not that clean, fair or predictable. It isn’t what happens to you that defines your life, it is what you do with it that does. – Dr. Laura Schlessinger
40. Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity. – Joseph Addison
41. It doesn’t really seem possible that being happy is as simple as deciding to focus on what is good in the world and not on what is bad. – Missy Marston
42. Happiness isn’t something this island yields easily; the ground is too rocky and the sun too sparse for it to flourish. – Maggie Stiefvater
43. Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished. – Neil Gaiman
44. True happiness…is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. – Helen Keller
45. Happiness is for those who don’t really need it. So I can live without happiness. – Bono
46. Relationships are complicated, but happiness in a relationship isn’t: It’s just wanting exactly what you have. Wanting something else is dispiriting. – Carolyn Hax
47. Happiness is not a destination. It is a mood, it is not permanent. It comes and goes and if people thought that way then maybe people would find happiness more often. – Mark Schwahn
48. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary. – Nicholas Sparks
49. Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness. – Anton Chekhov
50. Know you will win and you will win! – Stephen Richards
51. Making love to a person in their sleep is the only guarantee they’ll wake up with a smile on their face. – Bauvard
52. I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. – Nikos Kazantzakis
53. Every person knows how to smile, but it takes happiness to appreciate it. – Louise Philippe Dulay
54. Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred. – Samuel Johnson
55. Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice. – Agatha Christie
56. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes. – Bertolt Brecht
57. And what’s the point of changing when I’m happy as I am? – Paul McCartney
58. Live life as though nobody is watching, and express yourself as though everyone is listening. – Nelson Mandela
59. Whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, because I love you, yes I do. – James Taylor
60. The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy. – Pete Wentz
61. Happiness and confidence are the prettiest things you can wear. – Taylor Swift
62. From human problems come human solutions, which in turn spawn inspiration, creativity, insight and enlightenment. Without life’s problems, life would become stagnant, dull and boring. – Beth Johnson
63. I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite. – Hermann Hesse
64. Only internal bliss is perpetual, nothing else is created to last. – Carl Henegan
65. Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. – Dr. Seuss
66. Happiness is a warm puppy. – Charles M. Schulz
67. I’ve got nothing to do today but smile. – Paul Simon
68. It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will. – L.M. Montgomery
69. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile. – Mother Teresa
70. Happiness depends upon ourselves. – Aristotle
71. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. – Robert Frost
72. I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve. – Jane Austen
73. The greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances. – Martha Washington
74. Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
75. I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true. – Audrey Hepburn
76. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. – Edgar Allan Poe
77. Children are happy because they don’t have a file in their minds called “All the Things That Could Go Wrong. – Marianne Williamson
78. If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time. – Edith Wharton
79. I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy. – J.D. Salinger
80. It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. – Lucille Ball
81. The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely. – Louisa May Alcott
82. I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride. – Alexandre Dumas
83. It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything. – Alexander McCall Smith
84. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you. – Mary Tyler Moore
85. The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does. – J.M. Barrie
86. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. – Jane Austen
87. There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. – Charlotte Brontë
88. Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional. – Carroll Bryant
89. I do not think we have a “right” to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks. – Marlene Dietrich
90. Don’t sacrifice yourself too much, because if you sacrifice too much there’s nothing else you can give and nobody will care for you. – Karl Lagerfeld
91. The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors. – Thomas Jefferson
92. Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s. – Bertrand Russell
93. Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price. – Orson Scott Card
94. The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet. – James Oppenheim
95. My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. – Michael J. Fox
96. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. – Albert Camus
97. You can’t buy happiness. – Kurt Cobain
98. Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected. – George Washington
99. For those who are poor in happiness, each time is a first time; happiness never becomes a habit. – Marilyn Monroe
100. Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes. – Charles Dickens
101. No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make. – Dean Koontz
Happiness is a Choice Only YOU Can Make!
There’s really no clear verdict when it comes to happiness. One person will be happy with what little they get while it seems there’s no pleasing others.
Take what you will from other people’s opinions, but in the end, the one that counts the most is your own. Add your own musings to a list and perhaps you’ll inspire someone else to go after what they want in order to be happy.