Happiness & Meaning of Life quotes for UPSC & State PCS

Let us cultivate our garden.

A useless life is an early death.

No one can be happy without virtue.

Every day above earth is a good day.

Six feet of land was all that he needed.

Very little is needed to make a happy life.

A perfect life is a contradiction in terms.

It is better to live rich, than to die rich.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

He who does not value life does not deserve it.

He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few.

For all that has been — Thanks! To all that shall be — Yes!

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

The shortest way to wealth is through the contempt of wealth.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?

There is only one enduring happiness in life—to live for others.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

It all comes to this: the simplest way to be happy is to do good.

To enjoy—to love a thing for its own sake and for no other reason.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Life has a value only when it has something valuable as its object.

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.

If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

You are a king by your own fireside, as much as any monarch in his throne.

The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length.

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

The first sign that you are becoming religious is that you are becoming cheerful.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

A propensity to hope and joy is real riches: One to fear and sorrow, real poverty.

While I thought I have been learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

Making money from business is happiness, but making other people happy is super happiness.

As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Man struggles to find life outside himself, unaware that the life he is seeking is within him.

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

For the mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive but in finding something to live for.

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered as the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Remember happiness doesn't depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

As a day well spent makes sleep seem pleasant, so a life well employed makes death pleasant. A life well spent is long.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

I don't think Mr. Harriman is very rich. He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want and Mr. Harriman has not.

Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

The one thing our species is helpless against is good fortune. It first puzzles, then frightens, then angers, and finally destroys us.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Human Felicity is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.

The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, And the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

Life is too short to waste The critic bite or cynic bark, Quarrel, or reprimand; 'Twill soon be dark; Up! mind thine own aim, and God speed the mark!

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

Don't let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.

Many persons have a wrong of idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. It is wrong to expect some final satisfaction to come from money or from a computer.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

I live from day to day, and content myself with having enough to meet my present and ordinary needs; for the extraordinary, all the provision in the world could not suffice.

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

Socrates thought that if all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most persons would be contented to take their own and depart.

That man is of supreme folly who always wants for fear of wanting; and his life flies away while he is still hoping to enjoy the good things which he has with extreme labour acquired.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Possessions, outward success, publicity, luxury – to me these have always been contemptible. I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

If one only wished to be Sad, this could be horrible for the rest of civilisation; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.

The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators.

A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed and fortified by thought.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when her teacher explained to her that the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched but just felt in the heart.

How small of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find. With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads — Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.

We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance. Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

If a man own land, the land owns him.

We live to improve, or we live in vain

The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.

Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.

All is ephemeral — fame and the famous as well.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

Take the job that you would take if you were independently wealthy.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

I believe... that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

A thatched roof once covered free men; under marble and gold dwells slavery.

For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.

There is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

I don't want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country.

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.

I think I have learned that the best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.

There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread joy everywhere.

Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted.

One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!

Don't waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

'No one is useless in this world,' retorted the Secretary, 'who lightens the burden of it for any one else.'

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

When you were born, you cried while others laughed. Perform such deeds that when dying, you laugh while others cry.

The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.

It is the cheerful mind that is persevering. It is the strong mind that hews its way through a thousand difficulties.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Victory begets enmity; the defeated dwell in pain. Happily the peaceful live, discarding both victory and defeat. (Verse 201)

And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.

Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship. (28)

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return. (Hays translation)

This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive.

Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss. (Verse 202)

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.

No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves. (8)

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.

My mother ... had a wonderful sense of humor, and I learned from her that the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

There isn't time--so brief is life--for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving--and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.

It has been my personal experience that the true flavour, the real fun, the continuous excitement of work lie in the process of doing it rather than in having it over and done with.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Sobriety, as opposed to inebriety and gluttony, is of admirable use in teaching men that nature is satisfied with a little, and enabling them to content themselves with simple and frugal fare.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

I don't like honors. ... I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.

Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.

Gentleness, as opposed to an irascible temper, greatly contributes to the tranquility and happiness of life, by preserving the mind from perturbation, and arming it against the assaults of calumny and malice.

All people are born equal, all people die in the end and keep nothing of their worldly status. All riches, all power and all greatness exist only for so few years, why then is that mortality clung to so strongly?

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. … Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come.

Retire from your job but never from meaningful projects. If you want to live a long life, you need eustress, that is, a deep sense of meaning and contribution to worthy projects and causes, particularly your intergenerational family.

Since it is every man's interest to be happy through the whole of life, it is the wisdom of every one to employ philosophy in the search of felicity without delay; and there cannot be a greater folly, than to be always beginning to live.

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only.

It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. ... Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'

Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it.

Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; Think where man's glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends.

Ultimately, the reason why love and compassion bring the greatest happiness is simply that our nature cherishes them above all else. The need for love lies at the very foundation of human existence. It results from the profound interdependence we all share with one another.

Gautama... attained nirvana... fully liberated from suffering. Henceforth... as 'Buddha'.., 'The Enlightened One'.., spent... his life explaining his discoveries... in a single law: ...to be ...liberated from suffering is to be ...liberated from craving; and the only way ...is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.