Happiness And Suffering Quotes

#1. Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

#2. There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.

Matthieu Ricard

#3. External circumstances can contribute to one's happiness and well-being, but ultimately happiness and suffering depend on the mind.

Dalai Lama

#4. We are the creators of our own happiness and suffering, for everything originates in the mind.

Dalai Lama

#5. You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#6. In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.

Mahavira

#7. Those who are truly wise will remain unmoved by feelings of happiness and suffering, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, gain and loss.They will remain calm like the eye of a hurricane.

Gautama Buddha

#8. To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering.

Sam Harris

#9. I will always stay close to all compatriots, and share together the happiness and suffering.

Norodom Sihamoni

#10. Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter.

Sam Harris

#11. Happiness and suffering are feelings - parts of our mind - and so their main causes are not to be found outside the mind. If we really want to be truly happy and free from suffering, we must improve our understanding of the mind.

Kelsang Gyatso

#12. Happiness and suffering do not depend on being poor or rich, they depend on having the right or wrong understanding in our mind.

Ajahn Chah

#13. Your happiness and suffering depend on your actions and not on my wishes for you.

Jack Kornfield

#14. The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys and pains, is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation.

Annie Besant

#15. Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering?

Matthieu Ricard

#16. That's what Buddhism has been trying to unravel - the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind.

Matthieu Ricard

#17. When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.

Dalai Lama

#18. Good and evil exist only in terms of the happiness or suffering they create in ourselves and others

Matthieu Ricard

#19. Let us be the hope for those who are suffering.
Let us be the eyesight for those who are blind.
Let us show the way, nonjudgmental and kind.

Debasish Mridha

#20. Even if I have to do it alone, I will free all sentient beings from suffering and the causes of suffering, and set all sentient beings in happiness and its causes.

Dalai Lama XIV

#21. Attachment strangles freedom and clarity and makes us a puppet to our desires and cravings; attachment is the root of suffering, a root that if left unattended grows into a tree which drops the fruits of anger, greed, envy, dispersion, competitiveness, ego and pain

Evan Sutter

#22. This culture of mandatory happiness actually promotes dishonesty and more suffering.

Tullian Tchividjian

#23. The suffering and happiness in our world, both individual and collective, depend on our consciousness.

Jack Kornfield

#24. People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been
for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

Ayn Rand

#25. Be a human angel! With love, generosity and kindness, let us lighten the burden of suffering from humanity.

Debasish Mridha

#26. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

Herbert Spencer

#27. I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy.

Tyler Perry

#28. Only the enlightened are consistently happy. Their happiness is not predicated upon the events and experiences that take place in this world. Instead it is based on the boundless inner energy they gain from their connection with the world of enlightenment.

Frederick Lenz

#29. Our fragile, perishable bodies are not who we are. We are the sum of fleeting moments that belong to us for eternity. It is our choice and responsibility to create moments of beauty and grace, instead of despair and suffering.

Dorit Brauer

#30. Enlightenment, the great mysterious state of mind, is contentment, or freedom from suffering. How then do we measure happiness? We measure it in smiles, in the openness of our hearts, in generosity, in gratitude and compassion towards others, and in the steadiness of our contentment.

Andrew Furst

#31. My own view, which does not rely solely on religious faith or even on an original idea, but rather on ordinary common sense, is that establishing binding ethical principles is possible when we take as our starting point the observation that we all desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.

Dalai Lama

#32. The civilization of a state should be measured by the amount of suffering it prevents and the degree of happiness it makes possible for its citizens.

Helen Keller

#33. Living, if we go about it with selfishness and lack of awareness about our interdependence with the universal laws and other beings, turns into a nightmare of suffering with brief moments of happiness

Ivan Figueroa-Otero

#34. Most men, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war.

Vera Brittain

#35. The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person's suffering and bring that person joy.

Nhat Hanh

#36. Bold and bright, a trilogy of happiness would continue for a summer's duration and into autumn. It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.
Hard times were coming.
Like a parade.

Markus Zusak

#37. People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.

Svetlana Alexievich

#38. When in place of love you have grieves. And in place of glory nonfulfillment of hopes you earn, know that it's a natural catastrophe preparing you for distinguished conditions. - Darmie Orem

Darmie Orem

#39. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

Albert Camus

#40. If we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward them2 - and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and criminal law. Taking

Sam Harris

#41. Time is so long when there is suffering and so short when there is happiness.

Manny Steinberg

#42. We should practice by showing one another love and helping one another. It is a mistake to pursue happiness and to seek to the avoid suffering by deceiving and humiliating other people. We must try to achieve happiness and eliminate suffering by being good-hearted and well-behaved.

Dalai Lama

#43. A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life.

Leslie T. Chang

#44. When you make up your mind to forgive, your happiness will almost automatically follow.

Stephen Richards

#45. Whether people are beautiful and friendly or unattractive and disruptive, ultimately they are human beings, just like oneself. Like oneself, they want happiness and do not want suffering. Furthermore, their right to overcome suffering and be happy is equal to one's own.

Dalai Lama XIV

#46. When we have anger in us, we suffer. When we have discrimination in us, we suffer. When we have the complex of superiority, we suffer. When we have the complex of inferiority, we suffer also. So when we are capable of transforming these negative things in us, we are free and happiness is possible.

Nhat Hanh

#47. Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.

Adalbert Stifter

#48. There are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.

Albert Camus

#49. The experience of light in a very pure form always creates happiness. The experience of desire and aversion tends to create unhappiness.

Frederick Lenz

#50. Fulfill me, make me happy, make me feel safe, tell me who I am. The world cannot give you those things, and when you no longer have such expectations, all self created suffering comes to an end.

Eckhart Tolle

#51. I pray for a more friendly, more caring, and more understanding human family on this planet. To all who dislike suffering, who cherish lasting happiness, this is my heartfelt appeal.

Dalai Lama

#52. Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

Nathaniel Branden

#53. Life, U May told her, is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail. The monastery itself was surrounded

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#54. Your suffering is my suffering and your happiness is my happiness.

Gautama Buddha

#55. It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

W. Somerset Maugham

#56. God didn't let Job suffer because he lacked love, but because he did love, in order to bring Job to the point of encountering God face to face, which is humanity's supreme happiness. Job's suffering hollowed out a big space in him so that God and joy could fill it.

Lee Strobel

#57. That I may carry on what I have begun, that I may do good, that I may be one day a grand and encouraging example that it may be said that there was finally some little happiness resulting from this suffering which I have undergone and this virtue to which I have returned!

Victor Hugo

#58. Happy the heart to whom God has given enough strength and courage to suffer for Him, to find happiness in simplicity and the happiness of others.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

#59. When we say, "May I have happiness," or, "May I be free of suffering," or, "May any individual have happiness and be free of suffering," we are saying that it is the potential of a human being to expand our capacity for opening and caring limitlessly.

Pema Chodron

#60. And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#61. We have two lives ... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.

Bernard Malamud

#62. It came to me that I should teach this truth for it is real happiness and joy. The cessation of suffering is possible.

Gautama Buddha

#63. We simply prefer to deny death or tragedy at all costs and, with it, a fundamental aspect of life. We do this instead of acknowledging that suffering represents one of the strongest incentives of life, which is the base of human solidarity and what brings intensity to happiness.

Claudia Llosa

#64. When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

Sam Harris

#65. Time, what God first deemed holy above all else (Genesis 2:3). Thank God for the time, and very God enters that time, presence hallowing it ... I awake to I AM here. When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. (page 70)

Ann Voskamp

#66. The essential religion is taking the whole responsibility for whatsoever you are. And immediately an insight arises: 'If I am responsible for my suffering, then it is simple, I can drop it. It is my choice. I will not choose it any more.'

Rajneesh

#67. The greatest purpose of life is to serve the suffering humanity with love and kindness.

Debasish Mridha

#68. If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won't find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99)

Swami Satchidananda

#69. If you can't share wealth, prosperity and happiness, then you must at least share suffering, pain and death. To destroy in order to create!

William C. Brown

#70. When gratitude begins, then life finds the abundance and suffering ends.

Debasish Mridha

#71. After all, all human beings are the same - made up of flesh, bone, and blood. We all want happiness, and we all try to avoid suffering. We are the members of one single human family, and our arguments are born from secondary causes. Disputes, lies, and killings are useless.

Dalai Lama XIV

#72. All human beings have an innate desire to overcome suffering, to find happiness. Training the mind to think differently, through meditation, is one important way to avoid suffering and be happy.

Dalai Lama

#73. The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help (the client) acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering.

Carl Jung

#74. In Zen Buddhism an action is considered good when it brings happiness and well-being to oneself and others, evil when it brings suffering and harm to oneself and others.

Thich Thien-An

#75. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

Michel Houellebecq

#76. Happiness is not freedom. You may become happy tomorrow; but I assure you, your happiness will be smashed by the pains of your body as you age, by the all-encompassing death that swallows up everything and everyone in this world.

Frederick Lenz

#77. And indeed, here I am posing an idle question of my own now: which is better - cheap happiness or sublime suffering?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#78. There's a void inside most people.
It's been created by not being contented with who we are, not being happy with what we have, not being present and looking for something more, better, more exciting out there.
And we've always been trying to fill this void with something external.

Lidiya K.

#79. Understanding that everything is impermanent, that happiness is transformed into suffering, and that all phenomena are lacking reality in themselves and are only projections of our mind, will permit us to counteract the first hindrance to meditation, that is, our attachment to this world.

Bokar Rinpoche

#80. Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure - to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.

Annie Dillard

#81. I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Ayn Rand

#82. You are the custodian of your own happiness. What other people say, do or think does not create a basis for your happiness. It is you who decides your own happiness, just like forgiveness.

Stephen Richards

#83. A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that Nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such bliss would always be shadowed by the sorrow of the past and would therefore be imperfect.

Andrew Solomon

#84. There are degrees of happiness. You go from one to the other and then back again. It's hard to be completely happy when those around us are suffering and groaning from hunger.

Bob Dylan

#85. If we were never depressed we would not be alive - - only material things don't suffer depression. If human beings were not capable of depression, we would have no capacity for happiness and exaltation. Whenever you examine yourself, take into your capacity for depression,

Oswald Chambers

#86. Everyone is longing for love, everyone is suffering from the needs and wants, so be loving, kind, and compassionate to everyone.

Debasish Mridha

#87. We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That's the essence of samsara - the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.

Pema Chodron

#88. Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms are like duties paid in advance on a future succession of sorrows.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#89. As for suffering I do not wish even the slightest; as for happiness I am never satisfied. In this, there is no difference between others and me. Bless me so I may take joy in others' happiness.

Dalai Lama XIV

#90. When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

Victor Hugo

#91. The nature of everything is illusory and ephemeral, Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness, Like they who lick the honey from a razor's edge. How pitiful they who cling strongly to concrete reality: Turn your attention within, my heart friends.5

Sogyal Rinpoche

#92. Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#93. We must submit to the Will of God and kiss the hand that strikes us, for we know it is better to suffer in this life than in the next, since one moment of suffering willingly accepted for the love God, is worth an eternity of happiness.

Margaret Mary Alacoque

#94. I admit I can't shake the idea that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for.

Hugh Laurie

#95. The only reason you are happy is because you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice, and so is suffering.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

#96. Intentional suffering and the postponement of happiness is not yoga or Buddhism. It will not lead to a better incarnation.

Frederick Lenz

#97. Our suffering does not make us weak; only our avoidance of suffering makes us weak. And that avoidance - the avoidance of legitimate suffering - is unfortunately bolstered by the cultural attitudes of a society obsessed with cheap and easy happiness.

Marianne Williamson

#98. Finding love is a fixation now, and that's because although romantic love can sometimes cause a lot of suffering, it can also give people peaks of happiness that come very close to our ideal of 'the happy state.'

Francois Lelord

#99. The consequences of karma are definite: Negative actions always bring about suffering, and positive actions always bring happiness. If you do good, you will have happiness; if you do bad, you yourself suffer.

Dalai Lama XIV

#100. When we direct our attention toward our suffering, we see our potential for happiness. We see the nature of suffering and the way out. That is why the Buddha called suffering a holy truth. When we use the word "suffering" in Buddhism, we mean the kind of suffering that can show us the way out.

Thich Nhat Hanh