happiness on Not Geting What You Want

One way to be unhappy is to lack what you most want. Another is to get all you could possibly want and discover that everything is never enough.

Indeed, there comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where a voice inside us simply asks, Now what? After we have been introduced to Jesus and have found peace with God through...

One of happiness’s many paradoxes is that you don’t get happy by aiming at happiness but by leading a life worth living.

When sailing on the Titanic, even first class cannot get you where you want to go.

It’s hard to tell what brings happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed.

Not only are my possessions not bringing happiness into my life; even worse, they are actually distracting me from the things that do!

People are realizing that what seemed important to them in their lives-materialism and consumerism-doesn't work at all to make a happy heart. It actually makes an unhappy heart. And an unhappy wor...

If I could just come down on that telling phrase – God wants us to be happy… but God doesn’t want us to be happy. God wants joy for us. But joy is something rather different from happiness. Joy is s...

Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

People shoot for happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning…People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering…Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefi...

Money exerts a certain control over us because it seems to hold out so much (false) promise of happiness. It whispers with great force, "Think and act so as to get into a position to enjoy my ben...

Anyone who waits for happiness will never be happy. Happiness escapes us until we understand why we should be happy, change our perspective, and develop habits of happiness.

If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither.

We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a l...

People shoot for happiness, but they often feel empty, alone, and without meaning…People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering…Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefi...

It is as natural for the reasonable creature to desire to be happy, as it is for the fire to burn… But we do not make a right choice of the means that may bring us to that happiness that we desire. [H...

Simply Seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time. Seeking joy in and of itself will not...

We pray to You our Lord, our Savior, our Merciful God, that all our sins may be forgiven. Our sins are like a straight jacket, binding us, and keeping us from relationship with You. Although we know w...

For who wishes anything for any other reason than that he may become happy?

If you observe the people around you, you’ll find most individuals follow a formula that has been subtly or not so subtly taught to them by their schools, their company, their parents, or society. Tha...

Money won’t buy you happiness, but it will pay for the search.

What do you think would make you happier? Take a moment to consider. Might it be . . . A relationship? More flexibility at work? A new job that better provides for you and your family? An extra bedroo...

The film Shadowlands tries to capture the emerging relationship between C.S. Lewis and the American Joy Davidson, who would inevitably succumb to cancer. In one dialogue between the pair, the subject ...

People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic securit...

The oft-used front door to happiness is the one described by the advertising companies: acquire, retire, and aspire to drive faster, dress trendier, and drink more. Happiness depends on what you hang ...

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought; our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

In 1997, thirty-nine members of the cult Heaven’s Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite, participated in a mass suicide. They’d been taught that once they exited their earthly bodies, they would land on a ...

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

We aim for happiness but we settle for pleasure…which is only momentary.