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True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison The Spectator (1711-12)

Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions."
Aristotle

In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
William Blake, "Eternity" (1793-99)

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon (1825)

A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipated too great a happiness.
Fontenelle, Du Bonheur (1687)

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Eric Hoffer The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how deeply we pay for its counterfeit.
Hosea Ballou

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Albert Camus (1913-60)

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.
Viktor Frankel

The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.
B. Franklin

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often times filled with your tears.
Kahlil Gibran, "On Joy and Sorrow," The Prophet (1923)

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran,

Sadness flys on the wings of the morning, and out of the darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux

Real Joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.
Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940)

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mrs. A.S. Marks

True happiness... is not attained through self gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller, We Bereaved (1929)

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

Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things.
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims (1665)

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living with what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman MacEwan

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim - Also attributed to James Openheimer, one of the scientists who helped make the atomic bomb. The quote however, does not seem his style.

Happiness is a byproduct of an effort to make someone else happy.
Gretta Brooker Palmer

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure, are by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance."
Arthur Schopenhauer

Happiness is not in our circumstances, but in ourselves. It is not something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a fire. Happiness is something we are.
John B. Sheerin

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attributes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Indeed, man wished to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
St. Augustine, The City of God (426)

Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it the more it will elude you but if you turn your attention to other things it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau

Happiness held is the seed; happiness shared is the flower.
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