The search for happiness has long been a dominant feature of American life. It's a byproduct of prosperity, not to mention the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence.
— Meghan Daum
We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
— Maxwell Maltz
France is, for me, the country of happiness.
— Max von Sydow
Oh, I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk.
— Maurice Sendak
Many a happiness in life, as many a disaster, can be due to chance, but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.
— Maurice Maeterlinck
If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.
— Maurice Chevalier
Moms that get evicted are depressed and have higher rates of depressive symptoms two years later. That has to affect their interactions with their kids and their sense of happiness. You add all that together, and it's just really obvious to me that eviction is a cause, not just a condition, of poverty.
— Matthew Desmond
If you took away all pain, if everyone lived forever, everything would be bland, flat and boring; there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love because we would all be in a mono state of happiness.
— Matt Haig
It's a business when the NBA cuts you, trades you or waives you. But you're a villain, as a player, when you take your future and your happiness in your own hands and it's unfortunate.
— Matt Barnes
A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.
— Mary Wortley Montagu
In a culture obsessed with happiness, Americans may not be allowing for acceptance that it's OK to sometimes not be perky.
— Mary Pilon
Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.
I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.
— Mary MacLane
When you know what pain is, and when you have to make a choice, you learn that it is a decision. People think it's a fairytale thing, love and happiness, but you have to work hard. And then - you feel it deeply.
— Mary J. Blige
We all agree that its fit to be as Happy as we can, and we need no Instructor to teach us this Knowledge, 'tis born with us, and is inseparable from our Being, but we very much need to be Inform'd what is the true Way to Happiness.
— Mary Astell
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.
— Martin Seligman
What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice; they want meaning.
I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.
We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.
It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.
— Max Planck
Happiness is rarely absent; it is we that know not of its presence.
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
That's what Buddhism has been trying to unravel - the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.
— Matthieu Ricard
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
— Matthew Arnold
My personal life is a source of incredible happiness for me, but it's personal, and it's not for me to hock or shop around to the highest bidder.
— Matt Bomer
My kids' happiness kind of outweighs everything. Just seeing the smiles on their faces and the anticipation leading up to Christmas is what I love now, having kids of my own.
There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.
If workplaces that enlist happiness consultants really care about worker satisfaction, why not offer better maternity and paternity policies? Daycare options? They could advise managers to stop calling workers to come in on weekends or expect them to answer emails late on weeknights.
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy.
— Mary Oliver
Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.
We all of us deserve happiness or none of us does.
— Mary Gordon
Happiness is within. It has nothing to do with how much applause you get or how many people praise you. Happiness comes when you believe that you have done something truly meaningful.
— Martin Yan
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective.
Eventually, I realized that there was only so much that I could put in the way of my happiness, and acting made me happier than anything else.
— Maya Hawke
Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
— Maxim Gorky
I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.
We possess only the happiness we are able to understand.
An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.
For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.
— Matthew Stewart
Why would anybody say no to somebody's happiness?
— Matt Letscher
Co-parenting is probably the toughest situation that I've had to deal with because my ex and I really just don't get along. So, at the end of the day, I would tell any parents listening that once you're separated from your significant other - the father of your children, the mother of your children - the most important thing is the kids' happiness.
Dancing and running shake up the chemistry of happiness.
— Mason Cooley
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
— Mary Wollstonecraft
Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller 'Self-Help.'
I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.
— Mary McCormack
It's a really skewed part of our culture that happiness is the end-all be-all. The people that force themselves to be happy all the time often end up being the most broken.
— Mary Lambert
Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.
— Mary Baker Eddy
The goal of a life free of dysphoria is a snare and a delusion. A better goal is of good commerce with the world. Authentic happiness, astonishingly, can occur even in the presence of authentic sadness.
I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.
