Quant au bonheur, il n’a presque qu’une seule utilité, rendre le malheur possible.

It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.

my original view was closest to Aristotle’s — that everything we do is done in order to make us happy — but I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

Happiness is not best achieved by those who seek it directly.

The happier people can be, the unhappier they are.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

Happiness is for those who don't really need it. So I can live without happiness.

The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.

Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

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.

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

Happiness, so they say, makes one selfish... Alas! this happiness that is in store for some to the detriment of others must make one so, indeed. O my God! Shared happiness, that which one would find by working for the happiness of one's fellow men, would make man as great as his destiny on earth, as good as yourself!