"I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks."

"Remember, happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think."

"Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy."

"He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

"Exactly. How can you know it makes you happy if you’ve never experienced it?”“There are different kinds of happy,” she said. “Some kinds don’t need any proof."

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."

"Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?"

"Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's."

"You were already in a prison. You've been in a prison all your life. Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all. Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly. Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom? It's not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends. Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one, taken out behind the chemical sheds... and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.''You're wrong! It's just life, that's all! It's just how life is. It's what we've got to put up with. It's all we've got. What gives you the right to decide it's not good enough?''You're in a prison, Evey. You were born in a prison. You've been in a prison so long, you no longer believe there's a world outside. That's because you're afraid, Evey. You're afraid because you can feel freedom closing in upon you. You're afraid because freedom is terrifying. Don't back away from it, Evey. Part of you understands the truth even as part pretends not to. You were in a cell, Evey. They offered you a choice between the death of your principles and the death of your body. You said you'd rather die. You faced the fear of your own death and you were calm and still. The door of the cage is open, Evey. All that you feel is the wind from outside."

"Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content."

"Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don't. It's like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you'll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud."

"One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience."

"You must be the best judge of your own happiness."

"The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does."

"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

"Is anyone anywhere happy?"

"It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy."

"People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly."

"There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations."

"Just because you are happy it does not mean that the day is perfect but that you have looked beyond its imperfections"

"We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like."