It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

my original view was closest to Aristotle’s — that everything we do is done in order to make us happy — but I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

Happiness is for those who don't really need it. So I can live without happiness.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

All happiness is of a negative rather than positive nature, and for this reason cannot give lasting satisfaction and gratification, but rather only ever a release from a pain or lack, which must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty yearning and boredom.

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

Happiness, so they say, makes one selfish... Alas! this happiness that is in store for some to the detriment of others must make one so, indeed. O my God! Shared happiness, that which one would find by working for the happiness of one's fellow men, would make man as great as his destiny on earth, as good as yourself!

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.

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.

Happiness is a singular incentive to mediocrity.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.