Famous aphorisms in English

Happiness and Misery

 

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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

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