This search for happiness can knock us out of sync with God. As the life of Jesus makes clear, keeping in sync with God is about obedience. Any other pursuit will get in the way.

We have somehow gotten the idea that the abundant life Jesus promised in John 10:10 means an abundance of health, wealth, and happiness. The idea of suffering for the sake of Christ is foreign to us. We have substituted the pursuit of happiness for the pursuit of holiness. We hesitate to sacrifice even our material possessions for His cause, let alone sacrificing our lives or the lives of our children upon the altar of His service.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

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.

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

We're told about a woman's right to control her own body. But doesn't the unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

I'm convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: A better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.