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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
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| Lord Acton | Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State,
be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country,
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any
speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. | |
| John Adams | Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it. | |
| John Adams | Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it. | |
| John Quincy Adams | The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. | |
| Aeschylus | Only when man's life comes to its end in prosperity can one call that man happy. | |
| Aeschylus | It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered. | |
| Aesop | Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything. | |
| Aesop | We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. | |
| Aesop | People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves. | |
| Corri Alius | Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster. Your nobility of spirit will spark itself. | |
| Fisher Ames | The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality. | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means to push back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty. | |
| Hannah Arendt | In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish. | |
| Sir Walter Besant | Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | America would be better off as a country and Americans happier and more prosperous as a people if half of our government boards, bureaus, and commissions were Abolished, hundreds of thousands of our government officials, agents and employees were discharged, and two-thirds of our government regulations, restrictions, inhibitions were removed. | |
| Robert Bidinotto | Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place. | |
| Big Brother | Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. ... Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy. | |
| Sir William Blackstone | The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights. | |
| Robert Bork | [A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. | |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. | |
| Justice Janice Brown | The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable [...]
There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court. | |
| Pearl S. Buck | None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. | |
| Pearl S. Buck | Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it. | |
| Buddha | All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. | |
| Buddha | Friendship is the only cure for hatred, the only guarantee of peace. | |
| Buddha | | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Edmund Burke | The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. | |
| Whittaker Chambers | The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. | |
| New Hampshire Constitution | The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner. | |
| Luc de Clapiers | The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | [Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? | |
| Declaration of Independence | The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world... | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| John Dryden | O freedom, first delight of human kind! | |
| Sir Edward Dyer | O liberty,
Parent of happiness, celestial born
When the first man became a living soul;
His sacred genius thou. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. | |
| Albert Einstein | A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security. | |
| Albert Einstein | How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot. | |
| Albert Einstein | I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. | |
| Albert Einstein | Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Moderation in all things -- including moderation. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. | |
| Jason Gardner | It's difficult to view the world outside our human context. Staying alive and paying the bills both require our attention squarely fixed on our own business. Our sprawling cities and suburbs are wonderful and frightening tributes to creative self-absorption. In them, we spend our microscheduled days bustling between work and the endless details of our private lives, turning in our moments of rest to the buzzing distractions of television and computers - all accelerating toward some ultimate, unseen fulfillment of convenience and hyperreality. Little encourages us to pause and look around, much less question the end goal of all our busyness. Anything slower than the quick cuts of TV commercials is overwhelmed by our impatience and short attention. Unfortunately, we might be missing something important - to our happiness and to our survival. | |
| Khalil Gibran | The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking; always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. | |
| Eric Hoffer | You can never get enough of what you don't really need. | |
| Eric Idle | At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted. | |
| Indian Proverb | The most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | — My creed —\\
Happiness is the only good.\\
The place to be happy is here.\\
The time to be happy is now.\\
The way to be happy is to make others so. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [I]f we can but prevent the government
from wasting the labours of the people,
under the pretence of taking care of them,
they must become happy. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more.. .a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. | |
| Alice Kahn | For a list of all the ways
technology has failed
to improve the quality of life,
please press 3. | |
| Immanuel Kant | Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that
seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom
of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with
the freedom of all according to a possible general law. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. | |
| Ken Kesey | Take what you can use and let the rest go by. | |
| Genghis Khan | A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open. | |
| C. S. Lewis | To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow. | |
| C. S. Lewis | I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal. | |
| James Madison | But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. | |
| James Madison | The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself. | |
| Peyton Conway March | There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else. | |
| George Mason | All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety. | |
| Neil A. McDonald | Freedom is not a fixed and possessed thing. It is a quality of life. And like action itself, it is something experienced only by individuals. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Milton | When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. | |
| Ashley Montagu | It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison. | |
| Zero Mostel | The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter. | |
| Charles Alan Murray | We believe that human happiness requires freedom and that freedom requires limited government. | |
| W. A. Nance | No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him. | |
| Ogden Nash | There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball,\\
And that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all. | |
| Nebraska Constitution | All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent and unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the right to keep and bear arms for security or defense of self, family, home and others, and for lawful common defense, hunting, recreational use, and all other lawful purposes, and such rights shall not be denied or infringed by the state or any subdivision thereof. | |
| Harriet Nelson | Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself. | |
| Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787 | Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people. | |
| Thomas Paine | When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon. | |
| Thomas Paine | Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ... | |
| J. H. Payne | Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. | |
| St. Peter | Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. | |
| Plato | Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. | |
| Ayn Rand | Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom. | |
| Ayn Rand | My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. | |
| Sheldon Richman | It is embarrassing to have to remind people of this in the United States of America. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson singled out three natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The last phrase, appearing instead of "property," has prompted much discussion. I cannot say what Jefferson was thinking. But here's a plausible theory: Property is already implicit in liberty. If you are free, you can use your belongings as you see fit. But by specifying the pursuit of happiness Jefferson might have been pointing out that the blessing of liberty need not be justified through selfless service to others. One's life and happiness on earth are justification enough. | |
| Will Rogers | It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again. | |
| Roman Proverb | Felix qui nihil debet. (Happy is he who owes nothing.) | |
| Bertrand Russell | Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda. | |
| Florence Sabin | The prohibition law,
written for weaklings and derelicts,
has divided the nation,
like Gaul, into three parts --
wets, drys, and hypocrites. | |
| Eric Schaub | When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires. | |
| Albert Schweitzer | I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Death is a release from and an end of all pains: beyond it our sufferings cannot extend: it restores us to the peaceful rest in which we lay before we were born. If anyone pities the dead, he ought also to pity those who have not been born. Death is neither a good nor a bad thing, for that alone which is something can be a good or a bad thing: but that which is nothing, and reduces all things to nothing, does not hand us over to either fortune, because good and bad require some material to work upon. Fortune cannot take ahold of that which Nature has let go, nor can a man be unhappy if he is nothing. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Virtue alone affords everlasting and peace-giving joy; even if some obstacle arise, it is but like an intervening cloud, which floats beneath the sun but never prevails against it. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Before I became old I tried to live well; now that I am old, I shall try to die well; but dying well means dying gladly. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for it's own sake. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations. | |
| Adam Smith | How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If, then, it became so difficult, so nearly impossible, in most cases, to determine what is, and what is not, vice; and especially if it be so difficult, in nearly all cases, to determine where virtue ends, and vice begins; and if these questions, which no one can really and truly determine for anybody but himself, are not to be left free and open for experiment by all, each person is deprived of the highest of all his rights as a human being, to wit: his right to inquire, investigate, reason, try experiments, judge, and ascertain for himself, what is, to him,virtue, and what is, to him, vice; in other words: what, on the whole, conduces to his happiness, and what, on the whole, tends to his unhappiness. If this great right is not to be left free and open to all, then each man’s whole right, as a reasoning human being, to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," is denied him. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men’s vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation. | |
| Henry St. John | Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.
[Lat., Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet.] | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Alfred Lord Tennyson | Ring out the old, ring in the new,\\
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:\\
The year is going, let him go;\\
Ring out the false, ring in the true.\\ | |
| The Koran | He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh. | |
| The Mahabharata | This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. | |
| Thucydides | Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war. | |
| Thucydides | The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage. | |
| Mark Twain | In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. | |
| Vincent van Gogh | The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. | |
| Immanuel Hermann von Fichte | If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it. | |
| George Washington | Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other. | |
| George Washington | May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy. | |
| George Washington | Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind. | |
| George Washington | May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy. | |
| Martha Washington | The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances. | |
| Daniel Webster | There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today. | |
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