Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.

In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.

Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.

To measure a man's happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.

It is really most absurd to wish to turn this scene of misery into a pleasure spot and set ourselves the goal of achieving pleasures and joys instead of freedom from pain, as so many do. Those who, with too gloomy a gaze, regard this world as a kind of hell and, accordingly, are only concerned with procuring a fireproof room in it, are much less mistaken. The fool runs after the pleasures of life and sees himself cheated; the sage avoids evils.

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.