To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.

Every age but ours has had its model, its ideal. All of these have been given up by our culture; the saint, the hero, the gentleman, the knight, the mystic. About all we have left is the well-adjusted man without problems, a very pale and doubtful substitute.

Yet such persons are, without us, what the ideal of perfection is within us: models not for being imitated, but for being aimed at.

Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.

Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though 'twere his own.

I don't think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.

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.

There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.

Happiness then, is found to be something perfect and self sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

That mortal is a fool who, prospering, thinks his life has any strong foundation; since our fortune's course of action is the reeling way a madman takes, and no one person is ever happy all the time.

Structural analysis leads to some surprising conclusions concerning “normal” people, which are nevertheless in accord with competent clinical judgment. In structural terms, a “happy” person is one in whom important aspects of the Parent, the Adult, and the Child are all syntonic with each other….The following anecdote illustrates the structure of the “happy” personality carried to its logical end: A young man came home one day and announced to his mother: “I’m so happy! I’ve just been promoted!” His mother congratulated him, and as she got out the bottle of wine she had been saving for such an occasion, she asked him what his new appointment was. ‘This morning,” said the young man, “I was only a guard at the concentration camp, but tonight I’m the new commandant!” “Very good, my son,” said his mother, “see how well I’ve brought you up!” In this case, Parent, Adult, and Child were all interested in and gratified by his career, so that he met the requirements for “happiness.” He fulfilled his mother’s ambitions for him with patriotic rationality while obtaining gratification of his archaic sadism. In this light, it is not so surprising that in real life many of these people were able to enjoy good music and literature in their leisure hours. This distasteful example raises some serious questions about certain naive attitudes concerning the relationship between happiness, virtue, and usefulness, including the Greek aspect of “good workmanship.” It is also an effective illustration for people who want to know “how to raise children” but cannot specify clearly what they want to raise them to be. It is not enough to want to raise them to be “happy.

Happy is the man who is nothing.

A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

There is no such thing as a perfectly happy or perfectly unhappy man in the world. One has more happiness in his life and another more unhappiness, and the same circumstance may produce widely different effects on individuals of different temperaments.