Happiness Is For Fools Quotes & Sayings

Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man's composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself. — Henry MacKenzie

I was drunk: Christian and drunk. They just don't go together. But that's what happened. And the next day, obviously God had honored those prayers and healed me of alcoholism. — Jim Hamilton

If happiness in self-content is placed, The wise are wretched, and fools only blessed. — William Congreve

Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself - in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements." Perry, — Truman Capote

Harness the imagination: Sometimes curbing her, sometimes giving her rein, for she is the whole of happiness. She sets to rights even the understanding. She sinks to tyranny, not satisfied with mere faith, but demanding works. Thus she becomes the mistress of life itself. She does so with pleasure or with pain, according to the nonsense presented. She makes people contented or discontented with themselves. By dangling before some nothing but the specter of their eternal suffering, she becomes the scourge of these fools. To others she shows nothing but fortune and romance, while merrily laughing. Of all this she is capable if not held in check by the wisest of wills. — Baltasar Gracian

Most fools think he is the wisest person but the most wise person thinks he is a fool. — Debasish Mridha

If solid happiness we prize, Within our breast this jewel lies, And they are fools who roam. The world has nothing to bestow From our own selves our joys must flow, And that dear hut, our home. — Nathaniel Cotton

Nature is filled with tendencies and obstructions. Extremes beget limitations, even as a river by its own swiftness creates obstructions for itself. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Fate is the malevolent little jester sitting up in the heavens and pondering over how ridiculous we humans are and he does his best to make fools out of all of us. And sooner or later he succeeds. — Lisa Kleypas

And what else is it that men seek in life but power? If they want money, it is but for the power that attends it, and it is power again that they strive for in all the knowledge they acquire. Fools and sots aim at happiness, but men aim only at power. — W. Somerset Maugham

We're young, we're not monsters, no fools: we'll conquer happiness for ourselves. — Ivan Turgenev

And I couldn't tell my mother to fuck off.I'd be killed. — Audrey Bell

I cared more about your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act. — J.K. Rowling

I hope you're happy," she said to Mrs. James.
"Happiness is for fools." Helena James shrugged. "So I wish that for you. — Alice Hoffman

You never ask for permission, you just apologize later. — James S.A. Corey

My argument for them is not altruistic in the least, but purely selfish. I should dislike to see them harassed by the law for two plain and sound reasons. One is that their continued existence soothes my vanity (and hence promotes my happiness) by proving to me that there are even worse fools in the world than I am. The other is that, if they were jailed to-morrow for believing in Christian Science, I should probably be jailed the next day for refusing to believe in something still sillier. Once the law begins to horn into such matters, I am against the law, no matter how virtuous its ostensible intent. No liberty is worth a hoot which doesn't allow the citizen to be foolish once in a while, and to kick up once in a while, and to hurt himself once in a while. — H.L. Mencken

In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around. — John Lennon

Men have the blood of their fathers and the passions of their mothers, in the same sense that women have the blood of their mothers and the passions of their fathers. We often find ourselves trapped in life when we fail to balance the two. The most unusual of men are those who are haunted by the warped blood of their fathers and the untamed passions of their mothers. They become either the legends of the legends that mankind remembers for generations or they end up as the fools of their time, — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they'd had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools. — Anthony Doerr

Respect all living things, and never take what you cannot give back, or destroy what you cannot create. — Bryant McGill

Do you see, Harry? Do you see the flaw in my brilliant plan now? I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid."
"I don't - "
"I cared about you too much," said Dumbledore simply. "I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.
"Is there a defense? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have - and I have watched you more closely than you can have imagined - not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands. — J.K. Rowling

I've trained myself to fight an army, so one guy will not defeat me. — Georges St-Pierre

When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon. — Thomas Paine

O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe.

Take care! Hot noontide sleepeth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! The world is perfect.

Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo - hush! The old noontide sleepeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it not just now drink a drop of happiness -

- An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisketh over it, its happiness laugheth. Thus - laugheth a God. Hush!

"For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!" Thus spoke I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better.

The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye-glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! — Friedrich Nietzsche