I'm rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?

You are all too rich to be happy, child. For must not each of you be the constitutions of your family marry to be still richer? People who know in what their main excellence consists are not to be blamed (are they?) for cultivating and improving what they think most valuable? Is true happiness any part of your family-view? — So far from it, that none of your family but yourself could be happy were they not rich. So let them fret on, grumble and grudge, and accumulate; and wondering what ails them that they have not happiness when they have riches, think the cause is want of more; and so go on heaping up till Death, as greedy an accumulator as themselves, gathers them into his garner!

The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.

Why do you want to be rich? What do you want to do with your wealth?

things rich people do not want you to know: they are actually very happy

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?

People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.

For of mortals there is no one who is happy. If wealth flows in upon one, one may be perhaps Luckier than one’s neighbor, but still not happy.

Aside from the equation it draws between making money and being good, the modern ideal of a successful life posits a further linkage between making money and being happy. This latter association rests on … assumptions. First, it is presumed that identifying what will make us happy is not an inordinately difficult task. Just as our bodies typically know what they need in order to be healthy… so, too, the theory goes, can our minds to be relied upon to understand what we should aim for so as to flourish as whole human beings. … Second, it is taken for granted that the enormous range of … consumer goods available to modern civilization is not merely a gaudy, enervating show responsible for stoking desires bearing little relevance to our welfare, but is, rather, a helpful array of potentialities and products, capable of satisfying some of our most important needs.

I do not understand what the man who is happy wants in order to be happier.

Unhappiness. The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, "But how happy you must be!" we usually protest.

The richest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren’t particularly smart or rich.… That leaves me making music. But we can’t talk about that.

The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.

Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you already have.