Famous aphorisms in English
Happiness and Misery
Altruism and Cynicism | Art and Literature | Food and Drink | Happiness and Misery | Health and Disease | Law and Politics | Life and Death | Love and Hate | Men and Women | Science and Religion | Success and Failure | Uncategorized | Vice and Virtue | War and Peace | Wealth and Poverty | Wisdom and Ignorance | Work and Recreation
A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.
Henry Louis Mencken
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
George Bernard Shaw
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain
All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.
Lord Byron
And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
Jerry Chin
Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
Anxiety is interest paid on trouble before it is due.
Dean Inge
Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.
John Stuart Mill
Be good and you will be lonesome.
Mark Twain
Be happy. It is a way of being wise.
Colette
Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves for we shall never cease to be amused.
Unknown
Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
Peter Ustinov
Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Carol Burnett
Do not scorn the person who is perpetually happy. He does know something you don't.
Paul Jones
Don't do whatever you like -- like whatever you do.
Unknown
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.
Joan Powers
Even the the most tempting rose has thorns.
Tristan Eggener
Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone smiles in the same language.
Unknown
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.
Mark Twain
Expect everything, and anything seems nothing. Expect nothing, and anything seems everything.
Samuel Hazo
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know.
Unknown
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
Ingrid Bergman
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
Oscar Levant
Harmony seldom makes a headline.
Silas Bent
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.
Bessie Stanley
He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower.
Mary Howitt
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Henry David Thoreau
Here's to your love, health, and wealth -- and time to enjoy each.
Unknown
I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire
I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
Joe Walsh
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.
John F. Kennedy
I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
Carl Sandburg
If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.
Samuel Goldwyn
If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.
Anthony J. D'Angelo
If we couldn't laugh, we'd all go insane.
Jimmy Buffett
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
Anaïs Nin
If you suffer, thank God! It is a sure sign that you are alive.
Elbert Hubbard
If you wish you be like someone else, you waste the person you are.
Unknown
In life, we are all in the gutter. Some of us just tend to look up at the stars.
Oscar Wilde
It is by fighting and triumphing over the enemies of the Buddha that we ourselves become Buddhas.
Daisaku Ikeda
It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves.
William Shakespeare
It is not the bad times on which we should dwell, it is only poison to the mind and soul. We shall rise up after we fall, and continue to go on -- dwelling on the good, high-spirited times of our lives.
Austin Holmes
Joy is not in things, it is in us.
Jess Lair
Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.
Unknown
Learn from the past. Look to the future. Live in the present.
Steve Henthorn
Learn not only to find what you like, learn to like what you find.
Anthony J. D'Angelo
Life is ours to be spent, not saved.
D. H. Lawrence
Life is short. Live it up.
Nikita Khrushchev
Live each day as if it were the last day of your life, because so far, it is.
Unknown
Living well is the best revenge.
George Herbert
Man is only happy as he finds a work worth doing, and does it well.
E. Merrill Root
Misery is optional.
S. Gilmary Beagle
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Nostalgia is the realization that things weren't as unbearable as they seemed at the time.
Unknown
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation.
George Bernard Shaw
Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.
Anthony J. D'Angelo
Sloppy, raggedy-assed old life. I love it. I never want to die.
Dennis Trudell
So go for the jump, and chase all your dreams.
Mark van Essen
So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Aristotle
The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain
The surest way of severely upsetting yourself for hours is by continuing to consider what concerns you most for a single moment too long.
Christopher Spranger
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mahatma Gandhi
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Francis Bacon
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To live a perfect life, you must ask nothing, give nothing, and expect nothing.
Unknown
Trouble is part of your life -- if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.
Dinah Shore
Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
Unknown
We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
Aesop
What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.
Jean Paul Richter
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore. Jonathan Swift