“I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.”

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.

“Keep calm and chive on.” —As quoted in a 1974 interview with Lester Bangs

“Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections.”

“Alcohol make you drunk, man. It don’t make you meditate, it just make you drunk. Herb is more a consciousness.” —As recorded in filmed interview (1979) with Dylan Taite in Aotearoa, New Zealand

“In the abundance of water a fool is thirsty.”

“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”

“God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” – C.S. Lewis

“Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

How happy he, who free from care The rage of courts, and noise of towns; Contented breathes his native air, In his own grounds

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold The clear religion of heaven!

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

“More permanent and genuine happiness is to be found in the sequestered walks of connubial life than in the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure.”

“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”