I'd rather have written "Cheers" than anything I've written.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

To expect life to be tailored to our specifications is to invite frustration.

Prudence keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware, I sit content, And if each and all be aware, I sit content.

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Do not look back on happiness, or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.

Constantly choose rather to want less, than to have more.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.

Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.