Top 100 And The Pursuit Of Happiness Quotes
#1. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness ... but only when you pay your taxes? That means your freedom is rented, leased, & not unalienable.
Steve Maraboli
#2. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government ...
Thomas Jefferson
#3. When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.
Martin Scorsese
#4. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.
Matthew Woodring Stover
#5. The three basic material rights
continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.
David Brin
#6. Democracy rests upon two pillars: one, the principle that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; and the other, the conviction that such equal opportunity will most advance civilization.
Louis D. Brandeis
#7. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.
Winston Churchill
#8. The Declaration calls us to recognize the inherent equality of all people. And when it becomes unmistakably evident that a government is denying the governed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it's the right of people to establish a new government to secure these unalienable rights.
Mike Crapo
#9. For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.
Matthew Stewart
#10. Luxury is ... to be able to take control of one's life, health, and the pursuit of happiness in a way that is joyful.
Andre Leon Talley
#11. That is our generation's task, to make these works, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.
Barack Obama
#12. All equally see in the convulsion in America an era in the history of the world, out of which must come in the end a general recognition of the right of mankind to the produce of their labor and the pursuit of happiness.
Charles Francis Adams, Sr.
#13. This country was founded upon the principle that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - those rights are what make America great, and they belong to each and every one of us.
Charles B. Rangel
#14. People, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Bob Burgess, after the tall man with the tasseled scarf turned down a side
Elizabeth Strout
#15. America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others.
Alex Epstein
#16. Prosperity and abundance in a society depend on a certain type of person: the producer. Societies with few producers stagnate and decay, while nations with a large number of producers vibrantly grow-in wealth, freedom, power, influence and the pursuit of happiness.
Oliver DeMille
#17. When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.
David McCullough
#18. We were endowed by our Creator with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We were not endowed by the Federal Government. We were not endowed by entitlements. We were not endowed by pork barrel spending; we were not endowed by budgetary earmarks.
Lawrence Kudlow
#19. In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#20. If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
Terence McKenna
#21. The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate ... is a totalitarian's dream.
Steven Pinker
#22. Our unalienable right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those rights were stripped from college kids in Blackburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine. And, and from first graders in Newtown, first graders.
Barack Obama
#23. It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.
Tom Stoppard
#24. Where America was founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Sharia was founded on death, slavery, and the pursuit of power.
Nick Adams
#25. [Book's subtitle:] Designed as a beacon of light to guide women to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but which may be read by members of the sterner sect, without injury to themselves or the book.
Marietta Holley
#26. The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. It doesn't guarantee our rights to charity.
Jesse Ventura
#27. People truly reaching across boundaries - be they religious or race, political or geographic. A state that is sincerely civil and respectful of each individual's pathway toward life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be our goal.
Jon Huntsman Jr.
#28. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.
Dan Savage
#29. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.
Andrew Bacevich
#30. Could we not argue that America is about freedom, whether we live it out or not, but it really is about freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness. And that's what church is all about.
Clementa C. Pinckney
#31. Our democracy is dependent on people who passionately cherish the ideals of a democracy. Every man is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a wonderful idea, and it takes people who cherish that idea to be actively involved in the process.
George Takei
#32. So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington, through the Captial of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness! Hail! Columbia, happy land, indeed!
Solomon Northup
#33. The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Frank Norris
#34. Embracing a life content with fewer possessions has modeled for them the important truths that personal belongings are not the key to happiness, that security is found in their character, and that the pursuit of happiness runs a different road than the pursuit of possessions.
Joshua Becker
#35. Almost everyone nowadays is on the wrong track in their pursuit of
happiness. They think a great deal about having and receiving, about
outward show and success and being served by others. That is what most
people call fulfillment.
True fulfillment, though, lies in giving and serving.
Paulo Coelho
#36. Some decide that happiness and glee are the same thing, they are not. When we choose happiness we accept the responsibility to lighten the load of someone else and to be a light on the path of another who may be walking in darkness.
Maya Angelou
#37. Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.
John Grierson
#38. The idea that power was an end in itself, rather than a means to provide the security and opportunity necessary for the pursuit of happiness, seemed to him stupid and self-defeating." (about Senator Fulbright)
Bill Clinton
#39. Upon the whole, he added nothing to his own happiness by all the dangers, the fatigues, and the perpetual anxiety which he had incurred in the pursuit of unlimited power.
Suetonius
#40. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
#41. Love alone is the only reasonable activity or pursuit of humankind ... Fo r Love not only annihilates our fear of meaninglessness but empowers us to seek the happiness of others. And this indeed is our greatest happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
#42. The wise man knoweth where to stop, as he runneth in the race of fortune, For experience of old hath taught him, that happiness lingered midway; And many in hot pursuit have hasted to the goal of wealth, But have lost, as they ran, those apples of gold
the mind and the power to enjoy it.
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#43. America's Declaration of Independence speaks of "the pursuit of happiness," but nowhere in the Bible are we told to pursue this. Happiness is elusive, and we don't find it by seeking it.
Billy Graham
#44. It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.
Susanna Kearsley
#45. Cult: simply an extension of the idea that everyone's supreme aim in life is self- fulfillment and happiness and that one is entitled to wreck marriage, children and certainly one's health and sanity in pursuit of this.
Stephen Spender
#46. Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#47. History has shown time and time again that
there is no such thing as all things being equal. That is why Jefferson
wrote that our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. Nothing is guaranteed in life, especially happiness.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#48. Happiness is not always through success. Equally, the constant pursuit of success is sure unhappiness. But we have to find the balance. My own thoughts are that parenting is very personal. And we all feel enormous insecurity about parenting. What are they going to think of us 20 years down the line?
Amy Chua
#49. America stands for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness and for the unalienable right for life. This right to life cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the creator of life.
George W. Bush
#50. The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#51. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
Ayn Rand
#52. The earth is our home, the world is our playground ... created to better enhance our lives, whether for a short or long period of time in the pursuit and fulfillment of peace, love, liberty & happiness!
Timothy Pina
#53. Because of our freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. People assume the most important word in that sentence is 'freedom,' when, in fact, it is 'pursue.' If we don't pursue life, we are just as free to waste it. Our averageness is the degree to which we fail to attempt that pursuit.
Ryan Quinn
#54. I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know, everything that shines ain't always gonna be gold. But I'll be fine once I get it, I'll be good.
Kid Cudi
#55. Don't let the pursuit of happiness stop you from being happy right here, right now.
Karen Salmansohn
#56. There can be many opinions on a thing, but there is only one truth."
Vashet smiled lazily. "And if the pursuit of the truth was my goal, that would concern me." She gave a long yawn, stretching like a happy cat. "Instead I will focus on the joy in my heart, [...}
Patrick Rothfuss
#57. The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we're wrong we fight the hardest to prove we're right. Caught
John Verdon
#58. As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.
Andrew Delbanco
#59. The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#60. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
Whittaker Chambers
#61. Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
George Bernard Shaw
#62. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.
Allan Bloom
#63. We discover the vast difference between living and feeling alive when we discover inspiration." The quickest way to true happiness is not by ambling and obsessing about the limited pursuit of happiness, but by the immediate and actionable pursuit to be inspired.
Elaina Marie
#64. Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting.
Amy Bloom
#65. I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.
Lord Byron
#66. And like anyone who is in valiant pursuit of dreams, the ups and downs come and go, but the dream lives in the heart forever.
Chris Michaels
#67. The more we devote ourselves to the pursuit of holiness and happiness, the less likely we will be on a path to regrets. The more we rely on the Savior's grace, the more we will feel that we are on the track our Father in Heaven has intended for us.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#68. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
Ayn Rand
#69. Life in this world is short. Let us make use of our lives in the pursuit of happiness and not trouble.
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#70. We believe, as our founders did, that 'the pursuit of happiness' depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.
Paul Ryan
#71. The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends
Alain De Botton
#73. There is far more happiness in a life that is your own than a life in which you are handed the lines to say and shown the gestures to make. Do not ever be ambitious.
Ken Liu
#74. Love becomes imprudent only when it is impatient to enjoy; but when it is a matter of procuring the return of a happiness to which a baleful combination of circumstances has raised impediments, love sees and foresees all that the most subtle perspicacity can discover.
Giacomo Casanova
#75. I've grown to realize the joy that comes from little victories is preferable to the fun that comes from ease and the pursuit of pleasure.
Lawana Blackwell
#76. It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life 'better' or 'happier', in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.
Oliver Burkeman
#77. I don't think happiness is necessarily the reason we're here. I think we're here to learn and evolve, and the pursuit of knowledge is what alleviates the pain of being human.
Sting
#78. Happiness, if you think about it, is the biggest conundrum we face. The pursuit of it is why we do basically everything that we do, and yet, none of that effort is necessary: it's the simplest choice of changing our state of mind.
Brianna Wiest
#79. Man falls from the pursuit of the ideal of plan living and high thinking the moment he wants to multiply his daily wants. Man's happiness really lies in contentment.
Mahatma Gandhi
#80. Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things.
Philip Slater
#81. Equally important, anyone stupid enough to contemplate invading America would soon reflect on the fact that it contains hundreds of millions of guns, which are available to a population that takes its life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness very seriously.
Tim Marshall
#82. The right to "liberty" and "pursuit" of happiness is incompatible with a government that makes choices for you.
A.E. Samaan
#83. There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things.
Charlie LeDuff
#84. America's political system used to be about the pursuit of happiness. Now More and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.
Jonah Goldberg
#85. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these "if only" thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness. Joseph
Dan Harris
#86. For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.
Jimmy Carter
#87. When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable seem all our pursuits of happiness.
David Hume
#88. Software-industry battles are fought by highly paid and out-of-shape nerds furiously pounding computer keyboards while they guzzle diet Coke. The stakes aren't very dramatic. Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness? Nope, it's about stock options.
Nathan Myhrvold
#89. Discipleship is the pursuit of holiness and happiness. It is the path to our best and happiest self.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#90. It takes great wit and interest and energy to be happy. The pursuit of happiness is a great activity. One must be open and alive. It is the greatest feat man has to accomplish.
Robert Herrick
#91. The pursuit of material-external things as if they can provide deep and lasting happiness is contributing to a dwindling of real meaning and is a factor contributing to an increase in mental health problems. It just isn't possible to fill the hole inside us by piling up the things outside us. pg9
Dr Stephen McKenzie And Dr Craig Hassed
#92. I am Gabrielle Anwar: mother, lover, daughter, sister, friend, and creator in the pursuit of happiness.
Gabrielle Anwar
#93. It is not the function of the State to make men happy. They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk. The functions of the State lie entirely in the conditions or chances under which the pursuit of happiness is carried on.
William Graham Sumner
#94. If two people want to get married, it's their prerogative - we hope. Everybody should be able to do what they want to do and be in the pursuit of happiness
Mariah Carey
#95. Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man - for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
Ayn Rand
#96. The free society does not guarantee virtue any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed: it has to be won through personal striving.
Dinesh D'Souza
#97. It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved.
Jack White
#98. Perhaps in the pursuit of happiness, men and women take somewhat different paths. And, isn't it more than a little patronizing to suggest that most ... women are not free? They're not self-determining human beings?
Christina Hoff Sommers
#99. Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.
Madeleine L'Engle
#100. There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
Ayn Rand
