Our idea of happiness may be the very thing that’s preventing us from being happy.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.

Negative judgment of the results of one’s efforts tends to make one try even harder; positive evaluation tends to make one try to force oneself into the same pattern on the next shot. Both positive and negative thinking inhibit spontaneity. THE

I think I'm afraid of being happy because whenever I get too happy something bad always happens.

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of everything else.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable.

Similar to the way we are led along in life by the endless pursuits of pleasures, we are led along, even saved by the endless revelation of pain. This in itself may not be a happy thought, but it is a reminder of how relative, always, are our perceptions of misery and joy.

Those who have a burning desire to destroy the past — and the present — are unlikely to be happy. And their promise — or belief — that utopia is just around the corner is false and can never be fulfilled, which leads to further unhappiness.

What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

This fixation on the positive- on what's better, what's superior- only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be. After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she's happy. She just is.

Expectations are what destroy happiness — whether it’s in our relationships, with our kids, or with our work. Expectations are why so many people are so unhappy today, even in a world with so much abundance.

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!