My 10 Favourite Quotes About Happiness

I've been thinking about happiness quotes a lot lately, and there are so many bad ones floating around.

The ones that actually stick tend to do something different. They're specific, or they're honest, or they push back against what you thought you knew.

These aren't in any particular order of importance. They're just the ten that have earned their place over the years.

1. "Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions." (Dalai Lama XIV)

This one cuts through a lot of the received wisdom about happiness being a state you arrive at. People spend a huge amount of time waiting to feel happy, as though it'll turn up once the right circumstances do. What I like about this quote is that it puts the agency back in your hands without being preachy about it. It's not telling you to think positively. It's saying: go and do something.

2. "The purpose of our lives is to be happy." (Dalai Lama XIV)

Yes, two from the same person. I don't care. This one makes the list for different reasons. On the surface it sounds obvious, maybe even a bit shallow. But if you actually ask yourself if you treat happiness as a purpose or just a side effect of other things, the answer is usually a bit uncomfortable. Most of us treat it as something we'll get to eventually.

3. "Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking." (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor who wrote private notes to himself, probably in the 170s AD. He never intended them to be published, which is probably why they feel so unguarded. This particular line shows up in various translations, but the meaning holds across all of them. The idea that your circumstances matter less than your approach to them is one that philosophy has kept returning to for two thousand years, which suggests there might be something to it.

4. "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." (attributed to Mahatma Gandhi)

The attribution on this one has not been verified and is widely disputed, so take it with a pinch of salt. But whoever said it, the point is sound. A lot of low-level misery comes from exactly this kind of misalignment: saying one thing, doing another, thinking something else entirely. You don't need to do any deep reading to recognise that feeling.

5. "There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will." (Epictetus, Discourses)

Epictetus was a Stoic philosopher born into slavery in Hierapolis, in what is now western Turkey, around 50 AD. He wrote about what you can and can't control, and this line is a fairly clean summary of the whole Stoic project. I'll be honest, I find this easier to agree with than to actually do. But having the idea in your head at all is useful. When something's going wrong, it's worth asking: is this in my control or not? If it's not, you're just burning energy.

6. "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

Roosevelt said this in his first inaugural address in 1933, right in the depths of the Great Depression, which gives it more weight than it would have coming from a Sunday afternoon motivational poster. He wasn't talking abstractly. The idea that doing things matters more than having things has been backed up by quite a bit of research since, including work from positive psychology researchers over the past two or three decades, generally finding that experiences and activities tend to make people happier than purchases do.

7. "To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." (Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930)

This is the one that surprises people when I quote it. Russell's point is that the tension between wanting and having is actually part of the experience, not a problem to be solved. If you had everything you wanted immediately, you'd have nothing to look forward to. It sounds like a consolation at first, but the more I think about it, the more I think he's right. Some of the best parts of my week are things I've been looking forward to.

8. "Happiness is a warm puppy." (Charles M. Schulz)

I'm including this one because lists like this have a tendency to get a bit relentlessly serious, and Charles Schulz said something that's actually true. It was the title of a book he published in 1962, which became a bestseller. The point, if you want there to be a point, is that happiness is often something immediate and ordinary rather than something you build towards. It's also fine if it doesn't have a point. Not everything needs to be unpacked.

9. "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." (attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

Lincoln probably didn't say this. Quote researchers have found no evidence he ever did, and the attribution appears to have been attached to him around fifty years after his death. But I'm keeping it in because the idea is interesting enough to be worth arguing with, which is the sign of a decent quote. Is happiness really a decision? Probably not in any simple sense, and it's worth saying that for people dealing with depression, the idea that they could just decide to feel better is actively unhelpful. For ordinary low-level grumpiness about circumstances, though, there might be something to it.

10. "For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness." (widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson)

This one is also almost certainly misattributed. Quote researchers found the saying circulating anonymously from the 1930s, with Emerson's name first attached to it in the 1950s without any supporting source. The reason it earns a place here anyway is that it's practical in a way that a lot of quotes about happiness aren't. It gives you a unit. Sixty seconds. It makes the trade-off feel concrete rather than abstract, and sometimes that's exactly what you need to actually change how you're responding to something.

That's the ten. No one list of happiness quotes is going to be definitive, and I'd make a different list on a different day. But these are the ones that have actually meant something to me at one point or another, and I think that's the most honest recommendation I can give.