Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work reality often forces us to choose love or work.

I find happiness comes from numerous sources in my life. Most often the happy moments I cherish most are quiet moments with my wife and family back home in Nova Scotia.

With respect to the first of these obstacles it has often been made a matter of grave complaint against Political Economists that they confine their attention to Wealth and disregard all consideration of Happiness or Virtue.

I believe there is a relationship between having an interest in the arts and the behaviour of society as a whole. Some politicians find it difficult that the arts is a weapon of happiness... Politics is often about deprivation rather than the opening up of ideas and nourishing creative endeavour.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness because I am often down and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness it helps to know unhappiness.

Nevertheless whether in occurrences lasting days hours or mere minutes at a time I have experienced happiness often and have had brief encounters with it in my later years even in old age.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue and always an enemy to happiness.

The pop musicians often leave meaning in the dust and substitute it for cartoons. The deeper artists - the grunge artists in the world and the emoticon people - tend to leave all of the happiness out of life like it just doesn't exist.

How often we fail to realize our good fortune in living in a country where happiness is more than a lack of tragedy.

I've often thought if I didn't make my marriage work I would have failed at my one true shot at happiness.