Here are 30 great quotes about happiness from authors and poets [gathered by Regina Kenney].  

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“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

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”
― Charles M. Schulz

“No medicine cures what happiness cannot.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
― Marcel Proust

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
― Mark Twain

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.”
― Ayn Rand

“It’s been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”
― George Washington Burnap, The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures

“I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground 

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
― Aristotle

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire