Sermon quotes on happiness
W.H. Auden
In times of joy, we all wish we had a tail we could wag.
G.K. Chesterton
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Dr. Seuss
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Epictetus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Victor Hugo
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Immanuel Kant
Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
C.S. Lewis
“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered…What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then-that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.”
C.S. Lewis
Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose … only [upon] the Beloved who will never pass away.
Abraham Lincoln
Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.
John Medina
Researchers have discovered that when people sing as a group, as they would in a choir, oxytocin courses through their brains. An uptick in the hormone is a fairly reliable indicator of feelings of trust, love, and acceptance.
Brain Rules
Mark Oerter
We aim for happiness but we settle for pleasure…which is only momentary.
John Piper
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 benefits.” This may include stealing, borrowing, or working. Money promises happiness, and we serve it by believing the promise and walking by that faith.
J.R.R. Tolkien
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
Leo Tolstoy
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
David Brooks
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 benefits. Difficulty and suffering send you on a different course…the right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness…placing the hard experiences in a moral context and trying to redeem something bad by turning it it into something sacred. In the process, we may not come out healed; we come out different.
What Suffering Does, New York Times, April 7, 2014.
M. Scott Peck
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 bring it to you. Do the work of creating community, and you will obtain it-although never exactly according to your schedule. Joy is an uncapturable yet utterly predictable side effect of genuine community.
Brother Lawrence
There’s no greater lifestyle and no greater happiness than that of having a continual conversation with God.
Michael Howard
Your well-being is more dramatically affected by the people you see every day, people who live within a few blocks of your house, people who live within a few miles, than it is by distant connections.
“The New Science of Happiness and What It Means for Parents,” Fatherly, June 27, 2015, accessed May 10, 2019.
Albert Schweitzer
I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
C.S. Lewis
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
William H Sheldon
Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without reservation or regret.
G.K. Chesterton
It is a mark of the essential morality of fairyland (a thing too commonly overlooked) that happiness, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge; we can only admire scenery if we want to get past it.
Finnish Proverb
Happiness is a place between too little and too much.
Timothy Keller
If you seek righteousness first, you get happiness. If you seek happiness first, you get neither.
Christopher Lasch
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 security.
Mary Wollstonecraft
No man chooses evil because it’s evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
A Vindication of the Rights of Women & a Vindication of the Rights of Men”, Cosimo, Inc, 2008.
Thomas Merton
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Augustine of Hippo
Every man, whatsoever his condition, desires to be happy.
Thomas A. Hand, St. Augustine on Prayer (South Bend, IN: Newman Press, 1963), p.1.
Augustine of Hippo
For who wishes anything for any other reason than that he may become happy?
“Concerning Felicity,” The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, book 4.
Randy Alcorn
Until Christ completely cures us and this world, our happiness will be punctuated by times of great sorrow. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be predominantly happy in Christ. Being happy as the norm rather than the exception is not wishful thinking. It’s based on solid facts: God secured our eternal happiness through a cross and an empty tomb. He is with us and in us right this moment. And he tells us to be happy in him.
Randy Alcorn
Happy people look beyond their circumstances to someone so big that by his grace, even great difficulties become manageable—and provide opportunities for a deeper kind of happiness.
Randy Alcorn
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.
Matthew Henry
In him the day-spring from on high has visited the world; and happy are we, for ever happy, if that day-star arise in our hearts.
Timothy Keller
While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (New York: Dutton, 2013), p.31.
Thomas Manton
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. [Human beings] choose means quite contrary to happiness.
Twenty Sermons on Important Passages of Scripture,” The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 2.
Dennis Prager
[Contemporary Research suggests there is] little correlation between the circumstances of people’s lives and how happy they are.
Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual (New York: ReganBooks, 1998), 115.
Thomas Watson
He has no design upon us, but to make us happy. . . . Who should be cheerful, if not the people of God?
A Divine Cordial: Romans 8:28.
William Bates
The most essential and active desire in human nature is to happiness. . . . There is nothing more uniform and inviolable than the natural inclination to happiness.
Charles Spurgeon
God made human beings as He made His other creatures, to be happy. . . . They are in their right element when they are happy.
Richard Sibbes
Happiness being by all men desirable, the desire of it is naturally engrafted in every man; and is the centre of all the searchings of his heart and turnings of his life.
Blaise Pascal
All men seek happiness. This is without exception.
Jonathan Edwards
There is no man upon the earth who isn’t earnestly seeking after happiness, and it appears abundantly by the variety of ways they so vigorously seek it; they will twist and turn every way, ply all instruments, to make themselves happy men.
“Christian Happiness,” The Works of Jonathan Edwards: Sermons and Discourses, 1720–1723, vol. 10.
L.K. Washburn
There is a constant mental pilgrimage towards that Mecca of the human heart—happiness. . . . Everybody wants to be happy, and thinks, strives, wishes, and lives to that end.
“Helps to Happiness,” Freethinker 18, part 2, July 24, 1898, 474.
C.S. Lewis
Morality or duty . . . never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
English Literature in the 16th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 187–88.
John Calvin
It is my happiness that I have served Him who never fails to reward His servants to the full extent of His promise.
Joshua Becker
Not only are my possessions not bringing happiness into my life; even worse, they are actually distracting me from the things that do!
The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own, Waterbrook Press, 2016.
Jared C. Wilson
God doesn’t “just” want you to be happy; he wants you to be holy as he is holy and to find true, lasting joy in him.
The Gospel According to Satan: Eight Lies about God that Sound Like the Truth, Nelson Books, 2020.
C.S. Lewis
Morality or duty . . . never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
English Literature in the 16th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 187–88.
David Myers
When sailing on the Titanic, even first class cannot get you where you want to go.
Robert Frost
Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.
John Templeton
[T]hose persons who are on the leading edge of evolution realize . . . that the greatest happiness in life comes, not from the comforts and pleasures that money can buy, but from the investment of the days of our lives in a purpose which transcends our purely personal interests.
Jean Twenge
Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress, and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s a paradox here that we seem to have so much ease and relative economic prosperity compared to previous centuries, yet there’s this dissatisfaction, there’s this unhappiness, there are these mental health issues in terms of depression and anxiety.
Quoted in Jesse Singal, “For 80 Years, Young Americans Have Been Getting More Anxious and Depressed, and No One Is Quite Sure Why,” The Cut, March 13, 2016.
Brian Fikkert and Kelly M. Kapic
The last ten years, Americans have reported a steady decline in overall life satisfaction, despite the fact that average income per capita increased by 5.5 percent. We got richer, but became less happy.
Becoming Whole: Why the Opposite of Poverty Isn’t the American Dream, Moody Publishers, 2019.
William James
We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.
Prince
Money won’t buy you happiness, but it will pay for the search.
Brian King, M.D.
Let me be clear, nobody is happy all the time. In fact, to be happy all the time is indicative of a disorder.
Helen Keller
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
C. S. Lewis
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [pose] an obstacle to our return to God: a few minutes of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
The Problem of Pain
Mark Twain
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Following the Equator (1897)
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