I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity.

My thoughts about human happiness, for some peculiar reason, had always been tinged with a certain sadness.

So, we were born happy. We lost it. We were born with the gift of life. We lost it. We’ve got to rediscover it. Why did we lose it? Because we were working actively. They taught us to work actively, to make ourselves miserable. How did they do that? By teaching us to become attached. By teaching us to have desires so intense that we would refuse to be happy unless they were fulfilled.

So, we were born happy. We lost it. We were born with the gift of life. We lost it. We've got to rediscover it. Why did we lose it? Because we were working actively. They taught us to work actively, to make ourselves miserable. How did they do that? By teaching us to become attached. By teaching us to have desires so intense that we would refuse to be happy unless they were fulfilled.

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

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

Some people are born happy. No matter what their circumstances are they are joyous, content and satisfied with everything. They carry a perpetual holiday in their eye and see joy and beauty everywhere. When we meet them they impress us as just having met with some good luck, or that they have some good news to tell you. Like the bees that extract honey from every flower, they have a happy alchemy which transmutes even gloom into sunshine.

I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around. I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin. … I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I've always been free from hope. It's never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful. .... I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

I was born to be sad. I was born to suffer.

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.

I've a one track mind, sir. Poverty and gloom. Never a joyous picture of mine you'll see.Always gloom. I never do a jolly picture.

I have always been — I think any student of history almost inevitably is — a cheerful pessimist.

I have never believed much in luck, and my sense of humor has tended to walk on the dark side.

Nothing that has happened has made me feel gloomy or remain depressed. I love my life.