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.

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

Happy is not the right word. This world is not a place where we can be happy. It wasn’t created for man’s happiness, though many believe this is the reason of our existence. I think we are here to fight, so that good and evil can clash within us, and good may prevail, thus enriching us spiritually. It’s difficult to say whether we are happy or not: it doesn’t depend on us… There are times when one regrets being born, but life also gives us surprising things that, alone, are worth living. The issue of happiness doesn’t exist for me: happiness as such doesn’t exist.

And whatever you make of the country-by-country surveys of national happiness that are now published with some regularity, it's striking that the 'happiest' countries are never those where self-help books sell the most, nor indeed where professional psychotherapists are most widely consulted. The existence of a thriving 'happiness industry' clearly isn't sufficient to engender national happiness, and it's not unreasonable to suspect that it might make matters worse. Yet the ineffectiveness of modern strategies for happiness is really just a small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the whole notion of 'seeking happiness' is flawed to begin with. For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you're not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce. Even assuming happiness to be a worthy target, though, a worse pitfall awaits, which is that aiming for it seems to reduce your chances of ever attaining it. 'Ask yourself whether you are happy,' observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.

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

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure.

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase ‘’the pursuit of happiness'’ is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.

Sooner or later in life, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.

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 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.

If you think that happiness is all about driving a nice car or living in a big house, I’m afraid to say that you’ll never be happy. The mistake in the pursuit of happiness is to attach it conditionally to superficial, material objects.

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How pleased we are with it! How all-sufficient we think it! How, being in possession of the false aim of life, happiness, we forget the true aim, duty!

If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time.