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

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?

She's one of those people who flinch from the very idea of happiness — in her mind nothing could be more boring or bourgeois.

I do not like the idea of happiness — it is too momentary — I would say that I was always busy and interested in something — interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible.

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

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

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Unhappiness is simply when the picture in your head doesn’t match the picture in front of you.