Pursuit Of Happiness famous quotes
05-22-2025
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
-- Aldous Huxley -
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 -
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 -
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 -
The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase: if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.
-- C.P. Snow -
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. -
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 Rangel -
My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.
-- Charles Saatchi -
There's not much a newspaper reporter can do about dead men. But a newspaper reporter and a cop and a judge can deliver some justice. That's why the founding fathers wrote it up the way they did, I suppose. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of happiness. Everyone is entitled to those things.
-- Charlie LeDuff -
It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?
-- Chris Gardner -
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 -
The three basic material rights -- continuity, mutual obligation, and the pursuit of happiness.
-- David Brin -
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 -
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 -
It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.
-- Denis Waitley -
I am Gabrielle Anwar: mother, lover, daughter, sister, friend, and creator in the pursuit of happiness.
-- Gabrielle Anwar -
If America is the pursuit of happiness, the best way to pursue happiness is to help other people.
-- George Lucas -
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 -
The recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.
-- Hans-Hermann Hoppe -
All unprejudiced persons objectively surveying the grim events in Bangla Desh since March 25 have recognized the revolt of 75 million people, a people who were forced to the conclusion that neither their life, nor their liberty, to say nothing of the possibility of the pursuit of happiness, was available to them.
-- Indira Gandhi -
It is the pursuit of happiness that brings us happiness, and not the happiness achieved.
-- Jack White -
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 -
I believe everyone on this planet deserves equal rights to their own pursuit of happiness.
-- Joel Madden -
I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-- John D. Rockefeller -
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 -
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. -
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 -
There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy.
-- Joyce Grenfell -
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 -
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 -
The pursuit of happiness is in our Constitution. We're all entitled to have the best we can
-- Loretta Swit -
The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.
-- Lulu -
[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 -
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. -
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 -
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 -
Philadelphia, the foundation of freedom, liberty and democracy, I still believe in the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
-- Michael Nutter -
The most difficult thing for us seems to be to give of ourselves, to do away with selfishness. If we really love someone, nothing is too difficult for us to do for that individual. There is no real happiness in having or getting unless we are doing it for the purpose of giving it to others. Half the world seems to be following the wrong scent in the pursuit of happiness-many think it consists of having and getting and being served, when really happiness is found in serving others.
-- Nathan Eldon Tanner -
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 -
We have the ability to effect a great positive change in the world, starting with the training of our own minds and the overcoming of our deluded conditioning. Waking up is not a selfish pursuit of happiness; it is a revolutionary stance from the inside out, for the benefits of all beings in existence.
-- Noah Levine -
Olive Ann describes Sanna as 'a perfectionist and a worrier.' She is obsessed with the idea of finding happiness, and for her, as Olive ann wrote in her notes for the novel, 'happiness means being first with somebody, having perfect, loving children...The theme of Sanna is disillusionment,' Olive Ann wrote. 'Her life is the pursuit of happiness and perfection, but she finds happiness and perfection impossible to obtain-her idea of happiness is constant joy, no changes.
-- Olive Ann Burns -
That cotton trade was almost the deal breaker for me. It was at that point that I said, “Mr. Stupid, why risk everything on one trade? Why not make your life a pursuit of happiness rather than pain?
-- Paul Tudor Jones -
It is the pursuit of happiness that makes people unhappy.
-- Piero Scaruffi -
As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive.
-- Richard Hofstadter -
I want anyone who believes in life, liberty, pursuit of happiness to succeed. And I want any force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success, I want that organization, that element or that person to fail. I want you to succeed.
-- Rush Limbaugh -
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 -
Make no mistake; the American Revolution was not fought to obtain freedom, but to preserve the liberties that Americans already had as colonials. Independence was no conscious goal, secretly nurtured in cellar or jungle by bearded conspirators, but a reluctant last resort, to preserve "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
-- Samuel Eliot Morison -
Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high." A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.
-- Stephen Covey -
The Supreme Court has said that: Marriage is the most important relation in life. Now that's being withheld from the plaintiffs. It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. It's a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights and older than our political parties. One of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. A right of intimacy to the degree of being sacred. And a liberty right equally available to a person in a homosexual relationship as to heterosexual persons.
-- Ted Olson -
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 -
The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life on this continent.
-- Theodore Roosevelt -
The evidence of [the] natural right [of expatriation], like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness, is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man. We do not claim these under the charters of kings or legislators, but under the King of Kings.
-- Thomas Jefferson -
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 -
Life in this world is short. Let us make use of our lives in the pursuit of happiness and not trouble.
-- Tunku Abdul Rahman -
I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-- Victoria Woodhull -
To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.' Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.
-- Viktor E. Frankl -
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 -
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 -
The chief duty of governments, in so far as they are coercive, is to restrain those who would interfere with the inalienable rights of the individual, among which are the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to the pursuit of happiness and the right to worship God according to the dictates of ones conscience.
-- William Jennings Bryan -
I think government has a major role to play in helping us with the pursuit of happiness.
-- William Weld -
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 -
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 -
With all respect to Mr. Jefferson, I would put the pursuit of wisdom ahead of the pursuit of happiness.
-- Edmund Fuller -
It's a great game - the pursuit of happiness.
-- Eugene O'Neill -
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 -
It wouldn't take us long to discover the substance of that dream. It is found in those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, words lifted to cosmic proportions: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. This is a dream. It's a great dream.
-- Unknown -
We worry so much in this culture about being happy. The pursuit of happiness is even written in our Constitution. It's an erroneous concept because we are emotional, thinking beings that are constantly affected by a hundred things around us and inside us.
-- Agapi Stassinopoulos -
To us all, life is a gift, liberty is a right, and the pursuit of happiness is the object supreme. But our conduct in the pursuit differs in accordance with the measure of justice we uphold. A common measure is only possible when we begin to understand and learn to appreciate each other's point of view and point of direction.
-- Ameen Rihani -
For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.
-- Andrew Bacevich -
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 -
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
