I Choose Happiness Quotes

“How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?”

— Theodore Dalrymple

“But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning
the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life
a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.”

— Jed Rubenfeld

“Is there such a thing as a life without any regrets? I've never believed so. We spend our lives aiming for happiness and fulfilment in work, in love and with our friends and family, and yet often our energy is spent lamenting bad boyfriends, wrong career turns, fallouts with friends and opportunities missed. Or is that just me? I admit I'm naturally a glass-half-empty kind of girl, but I know regrets are a burden to happiness and I'm trying to let go of them because I've learned that it's all about choice. You can choose to turn regrets into lessons that change your future. Believe me when I say I'm really trying to do this. But the truth is, I'm failing. Because all I can think right now is: maybe I deserve it. Maybe this is my penance.”

— Ali Harris

“I love him more than he will ever know. And because of that, I choose his happiness.”

— Rebecca Donovan

“Gabe realized he was standing there alone, with a goofy smile on his face. Limping inside, he closed the door behind him, her words still lingering in his mind. Gabe wanted more than anything to be able to choose happiness. He wanted a rain storm to make him smile. He desired that the simple task of cooking would make him dance. To Gabe, however, it didn't seem as simple as just making a choice. He hoped her joy was contagious, because he was in uncharted territories.”

— Wendy Owens

“Depression, anger, and sadness are states of mind, and so are happiness, peace, and contentment. You can choose to be in any of these states because it's your mind.”

— Maddy Malhotra

“The decision is mine, and I choose happiness”

— Malori Howell

“The business of being happy requires making a conscious choice. People think being happy will just happen to them someday, if only they do this or that right. But it doesn't - you have to choose it. You choose happiness, you don't wait for it to choose you.”

— Bethenny Frankel

“Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a "wasteland" and other helpful descriptions.”

— Eve Babitz

“Choose your words wisely, because they will influence your happiness, your relationships, and your personal wealth.”

— Andrew B. Newberg

“You know, my love, you are not responsible for my happiness, or even my health. I've had a choice every step of the way, from our very first meeting. I chose you. Clearly, in my heart and in my head, I chose you. If I had it to do all over again, even knowing what I would have to go through, I would choose you without hesitation.”

— Christine Feehan

“My message is that happiness is the first principle of life. But you must choose it. We all have pain, but suffering is a choice. You can be happier if you make some changes in your life.”

— Alexandra Stoddard

“When you expect happiness, you live happily. You also live happily when you choose to be happy. Expect less, choose more.”

— Robert J. Braathe

“There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.”

— Lin Yutang

“Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.”

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“Feminism's agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to choose between public justice and private happiness.”

— Susan Faludi

“There is a new wave of interest in exploring how to frame choices so that people make better decisions. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, professors of economics and law, respectively, teamed up to write Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which advocates using defaults to nudge us to make better choices.9 Even when we are choosing in our own interests, we often choose unwisely. When employees have the option of participating in a retirement-savings scheme, many do not, despite the financial advantages of doing so. If their employer instead automatically enrolls them, giving them the choice of opting out, participation jumps dramatically”

— Peter Singer

“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I am as you see me. I am happy and able because I allow myself to be happy. I learned young that being active breeds more activity. That the gift of studying is knowledge. That seeing grants sight. That if you don't feel anger, you won't be angry. Sadness and frustration, even tragedy, are inevitable, but that doesn't mean that happiness isn't there for us, for all of us. My secret is that I choose to be the person that I want to be. That I don't believe in destiny or predetermination, but in choice, and that each of us chooses to be the person we are. Whatever you want to be you can be; whatever you want to do you can do; wherever you want to go you can go. The world, and the life ahead, is ours for the taking. The future is unwritten, and you can make it whatever you want it to be.”

— James Frey

“It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable ... What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.”

— Amy Tan

“If you're still, and if you don't hope too much, peace will come to you. It's a grace. But you have to choose happiness.”

— Dean Koontz

“Success is a combination of many things, but a good character is the foundation of the kind of success that will bring you real happiness. Choose your friends wisely-they will make or break you.”

— J. Willard Marriott

“Real wisdom is recognizing and accepting that every experience is impermanent. With this insight you will not be overwhelmed by ups and downs. And when you are able to maintain an inner balance, you can choose to act in ways that will create happiness for you and for others. Living each moment happily with an equanimous mind, you will surely progress toward the ultimate goal of liberation from all suffering.”

— S. N. Goenka

“You have to take an active role in making yourself happy. That's why I say happiness is a choice. Because you have to choose it.”

— Shay Carl

“Personal happiness is so important, most choose to let someone else take care of it.”

— Terry Rossio

“Every action generates a force of energy that returns to us in like kind ... what we sow is what we reap. And when we choose actions that bring happiness and success to others, the fruit of our karma is happiness and success.”

— Deepak Chopra

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks-no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.”

— James Madison

“A thing chosen always as an end and never as a means we call absolutely final. Now happiness above all else appears to be absolutely final in this sense, since we always choose it for its own sake and never as a means to something else.”

— Aristotle

“You have the choice. You can choose joy over despair, happiness over tears, action over apathy, growth over stagnation.”

— Leo Buscaglia

“Nothing can bring you happiness but yourself especially how you choose to think about your situation.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The spiritual life is a life beyond moods. It is a life in which we choose joy and do not allow ourselves to become victims of passing feelings of happiness or depression.”

— Henri Nouwen

“Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.”

— Henry James