It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

Nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

There is no greater pain than to remember, in our present grief, past happiness.

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

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

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

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

There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.

But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness.

There is no greater sorrow...than to be mindful of the happy time.

I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining.

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.

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