Our nation was founded on the principals of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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.

Getting pregnant wasn't easy and I found that devastating. I really beat myself up for waiting so long when I'd always wanted children and family had been the basis of my happiness my whole life.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

The founders of a new colony whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and another portion as the site of a prison.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found and each believes it possessed by others to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness not because they never found it but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.