“We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.” — Carlos Castaneda, 20th-century Latin American mystic and author

“All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it’s truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy.” — Dennis Prager, 20th-century American radio host and author

“Don’t worry. Be happy.” — Meher Baba, 20th-century Indian spiritual leader (popularized in a song by Bobby McFerrin, 20th-century American songwriter and performer)

“Be happy. Talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours…. never doubt the excellence and permanence of what is yet to be. Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness…. Your success and happiness lie in you…. The great enduring realities are love and service…. Resolve to keep happy and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” — Helen Keller, 20th-century American social activist, public speaker and author

“Since the things we do determine the character of life, no blessed person can become unhappy. For he will never do those things which are hateful and petty.” — Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher

“I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (in letter to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1811)

“To describe happiness is to diminish it.” — Henri Stendahl, 19th-century French novelist

“I believe… that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.” — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th-century U.S. president (in a letter to John Adams, 1816)

“People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.” — Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher (from the Nichomachean Ethics)

“Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, Nobel Prize-winning 19th-century Russian novelist (from Anna Karenina)

“If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” — Charles-Louis de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, 17th/18th-century French jurist and political philosopher

“A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand.” — Seneca, Roman statesman and author

“Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.” — Andre Gide, 20th-century French author

“The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.” — Woody Allen, 20th-century American humorist and filmmaker

“All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.” — Lord Byron, 19th- century English poet

“If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.” — Bertrand Russell, 20th-century British mathematician and philosopher

“Happiness is knowin’ you’ve done a good job, whether it’s professional of for another person.” — Elvis Presley

“See to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you.” — James Freeman Clarke

“Those who seek happiness, miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it.” — Holbrook Jackson “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” —Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher

“Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist

“A great obstacle to happiness is expecting too much happiness.” — Bernard de Fontanelle “Happiness is not the end of life: character is.” — Henry Ward Beecher, 19th-century American preacher

“The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not our circumstances.” — Martha Washington, 18th-century American First Lady

“To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist, public philosopher and poet