QUOTES ABOUT HAPPINESS

As a species, we don't really seem cut out for happiness. So if I had to guess...I'd say that we were put on Earth to grow. To discover ourselves. To find the lives that fit us. Or, if not...then to at least find some people with whom we can enjoy the lack of answers.

I am interested in human happiness, sir, in the better understanding of what it is and how it may be achieved. I wish to explore whether it is a state which arises from the chance convergence of circumstances, or whether it is a condition we may will ourselves to possess. I want to understand how we may recognise it when it is within our grasp and in what ways we can learn to live without it if we are not lucky enough to experience it.

MASHA:
Happy is he who doesn’t notice whether it's winter or summer. If I were in Moscow, I think I wouldn’t mind about the weather.

VERSHININ:
Just recently I read the prison memoirs of a French minister — he was imprisoned over the Panama affair. He describes with such ecstasy the little birds he could see through the prison window, which he had never noticed before when he was a minister. Now that he is free again, he notices them no more. And so it will be with you when you live in Moscow — you won’t notice it. There is no happiness, nor should there be; we can only long for it.

Funny," Will said, as they picked their way through. "Things are absolutely awful, and yet people look much happier than usual. Look at them all. Bubbling."

"They are English," Merriman said.

"Quite right," said Will's father. "Splendid in adversity, tedious when safe. Never content, in fact. We're an odd lot.