On Happiness

The Sun magazine publishes quotes on its back page every issue. The May issue's quotes addressed happiness, and I found a few I wish I had said:

"I have to tell you something. I cannot help being happy. I've struggled against it but to no good. Apart from an odd five minutes here and there, I have been happy all my life. There is, I am well aware, no virtue whatever in this. It results from a combination of heredity, health, good fortune, and shallow intellect." -- Arthur Marshall

"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, to not love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore to be happy one must love or love to suffer. Or suffer from too much happiness." -- Woody Allen

"It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how...and still be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it." -- Henry Miller

"Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget the days of less happiness are passing by." -- Elizabeth Bishop

(250 mostly borrowed words)