Samuel Johnson Quotes About Happiness
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"I fly from pleasure," said the prince, "because pleasure has ceased to please; I am lonely because I am miserable, and am unwilling to cloud with my presence the happiness of others."
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When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.
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All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
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We seldom require more to the happiness of the present hour than to surpass him that stands next before us.
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To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
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We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.
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The size of a man's understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth.
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So scanty is our present allowance of happiness that in many situations life could scarcely be supported if hope were not allowed to relieve the present hour by pleasures borrowed from the future.
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What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.
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Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadsul than its extinction.
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There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.
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To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.
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Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
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The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.
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Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.
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The fiction of happiness is propagated by every tongue and confirmed by every look till at last all profess the joy which they do not feel and consent to yield to the general delusion.
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Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.
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None are happy but by anticipation of change.
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No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.
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Try and forget our cares and sickness, and contribute, as we can to the happiness of each other.
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Good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy.
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The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind.
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He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.
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Happiness is enjoyed only in proportion as it is known; and such is the state or folly of man, that it is known only by experience of its contrary.
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For who is pleased with himself.
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Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings; let us be therefore cautious of how we strip her.
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Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from time to come.
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We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
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As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
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The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an individual weight of calumny will be super-added.
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