"Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer's 'yes,' all's well. That is enough."
(Louis-Ferdinand Céline)

"Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss."
(Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo)

"The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it."
(Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi)

"The joy of life? Is there salvation in that?"
(Henrik Ibsen)

"There's nothing else in life but youth and love unending tenderness and quiet happiness." (Hjalmar Söderberg, Gertrude)

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd, because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
(Douglas Adams)

"To be happy is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?"
(Henrik Ibsen)

"To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright."
(Walter Benjamin)

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
(Albert Camus)