Top 100 Quotes About The Pursuit Of Happiness
#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. 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
#3. There is something very unique in American iconography about this notion of the pursuit of happiness.
David Henry Hwang
#4. I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Parker Palmer
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
Richard Hofstadter
#9. 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
#10. If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.
George Lucas
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
C.P. Snow
#14. I think government has a major role to play in helping us with the pursuit of happiness.
William Weld
#15. Our predicament is not the difficulty of attaining happiness, but the difficult of avoiding the misery to which the pursuit of happiness exposes us.
Michael Joseph Oakeshott
#16. 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
#18. You know, American citizens, I don't think, ever thought that the right to the pursuit of happiness did not include the right to marry the person you love. But for a whole number of Americans, gay Americans, that happens to be true.
Andrew Sullivan
#19. My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.
Charles Saatchi
#20. 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
#21. The three basic material rights
continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.
David Brin
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Don't let the pursuit of happiness stop you from being happy right here, right now.
Karen Salmansohn
#26. It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.
Denis Waitley
#27. With all respect to Mr. Jefferson, I would put the pursuit of wisdom ahead of the pursuit of happiness.
Edmund Fuller
#28. 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
#29. For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.
Matthew Stewart
#30. The single most important principle I ever discovered is this: the goal or purpose of the Christian is precisely the pursuit of happiness - in God. The reason for this is that there is no greater way to glorify God than to find in Him the happiness that my soul so desperately craves.
Sam Storms
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. America is a mosaic not of groups but of individuals, each of whom carries a host of cultural influences, some chosen, some inherited, some absorbed by osmosis. That mosaic is held together by the pursuit of happiness, the most powerful mortar ever conceived. Left alone, it will long endure.
Virginia Postrel
#35. 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.
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The pursuit of prosperity shouldn't stop you from the pursuit of happiness.
Richie Norton
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. When ... we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings.
Aristotle.
#42. Life in this world is short. Let us make use of our lives in the pursuit of happiness and not trouble.
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#43. Life is all about conflict. The pursuit of happiness - that's life, not the achievement. It's all about the journey, my friend.
Michael J. Sullivan
#44. You may find that the pursuit of happiness is at times a lonely road. Don't give up. Stay the course!
K.J. Kilton
#45. 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
#46. We believe, as our founders did, that 'the pursuit of happiness' depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.
Paul Ryan
#47. Increasingly we confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of pleasure.
Rick Perlstein
#48. 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
#49. It is the pursuit of happiness that makes people unhappy.
Piero Scaruffi
#50. 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.
#51. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.
Leo Strauss
#52. The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.
Lulu
#53. Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
George Will
#54. 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
#55. I'm not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The Pursuit of Happiness: It sure seems to like a good chase, doesn't it?
Demetri Martin
#59. 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
#60. [If] a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#61. 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
#62. When politicians prioritize local rule instead of trying to force the whole country to agree with them, I think the pursuit of happiness will be within the reach of a far greater portion of our populace.
Ben Carson
#63. As for the pursuit of happiness on this planet: I was as happy as any human being in history. "Thank God," I thought, "that cigarette was only a dream.
Kurt Vonnegut
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. It is easy to lose sight of the ultimate purpose of economic policy: the life satisfaction of the population. That ultimate goal should be unassailable for a country founded precisely to defend the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.
Jeffrey D. Sachs
#69. [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
#70. 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
#71. If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.
Douglas Kennedy
#72. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#73. 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
#74. I am Gabrielle Anwar: mother, lover, daughter, sister, friend, and creator in the pursuit of happiness.
Gabrielle Anwar
#75. 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
#76. There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.
Joyce Grenfell
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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.
#80. 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
#81. It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved.
Jack White
#82. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.
Dan Harris
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. For many, many people, getting married is one of the most important things they will ever do in the pursuit of happiness.
Marianne Williamson
#86. I believe our clever young man has intuited that while only the pursuit of happiness is promised to all Americans, unhappiness is guaranteed for many.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. You know that saying 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'? That's so true of positive psychology. Our latest research tells us that the pursuit of happiness is a delicate art. Certain approaches to seeking happiness are now known to backfire, whereas others are effective.
Barbara Fredrickson
#91. The pursuit of happiness seems worthwhile only because of the chase. You love it only if you don't realize you're never going to catch up.
Bryan Way
#92. What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans.
Roy Baumeister
#93. 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
#94. I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but its opposite.
Jamaica Kincaid
#95. The People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Frank Norris
#96. I try to learn something from every character I take on. I try to better myself personally from it and Red allowed me to go ahead and accept what I did. Even though I had passion driving me, I still felt a little guilty that I gave up all the businesses in the pursuit of happiness.
Drew Waters
#97. You know what made us the biggest, meanest, Big Mac eating, calorie-counting, world-dominating kick-ass powerhouse country in the history of the human race? The pursuit of happiness. Not happiness. The pursuit.
Will Ferguson
#98. The pursuit of happiness is in our Constitution. We're all entitled to have the best we can.
Loretta Swit
#99. That word again. Happy. It's a curse. The pursuit of happiness makes us deeply unhappy. It's a trap.Before anything else happened, there was me in bed, thinking of who you used to be.
I don't want you to think I forgot.
David Levithan
#100. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
