QUOTATION: Happiness

The ultimate goal for us all is that of becoming happy. Yet happiness exists only in company with each other, and we can keep company only in the infinity of Love. There is happiness only in removal of the barriers of the self in moving into divinity, in becoming divine.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Ministry and Life of Priests”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Happiness of the Soul

I say, then, that the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections; not in sensual pleasures, not in activity, not in excitement, not in self esteem, not in the consciousness of power, not in knowledge; in none of these things lies our happiness, but in our affections being elicited, employed, supplied. As hunger and thirst, as taste, sound, and smell, are the channels through which this bodily frame receives pleasure, so the affections are the instruments by which the soul has pleasure. When they are exercised duly, it is happy; when they are undeveloped, restrained, or thwarted, it is not happy. This is our real and true bliss, not to know, or to affect, or to pursue; but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore. Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: The Greatest Deception

The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.

--St. John Paul II, Homily, World Youth Day, Toronto, July 28, 2002

QUOTATION: Happiness

It is impossible for man to find that true happiness, which he desires naturally, in any limited good: pleasures, riches, honor, glory, power, knowledge. Our mind, noticing at once the limits of these goods, conceives a higher good and carries us on to desire that higher good. We must repeat: Our will, illumined by our intelligence, has a depth without measure, a depth which only God can fill.

--Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting

QUOTATION: Where to Find Happiness

Happiness is something we all want, but one of the great tragedies in this world is that so many people never find it, because they look for it in the wrong places. The key to it is very simple – true happiness is to be found in God. We need to have the courage to place our deepest hopes in God alone, not in money, in a career, in worldly success, or in our relationships with others, but in God. Only he can satisfy the deepest needs of our hearts.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION:Virtue and Vice

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

--François Fenelon

QUOTATION: The Secret to Happiness

One of the best ways to get happiness and pleasure out of life is to ask ourselves, “How can I please God?" It is the pleasure-seeker who is bored, for all pleasures diminish with repetition.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Happiness

God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Happiness

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even be plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

QUOTATION: Happiness

You need a heart which is in love, not an easy life, to achieve happiness.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: Holy Abandonment

In this holy abandonment springs up that beautiful freedom of spirit which the perfect possess, and in which there is found all the happiness that can be desired in this life; for in fearing nothing, and seeking and desiring nothing of all things of the world, they possess all.

-- Saint Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: The Purpose of the Passion

Our Lord is upon the Cross saying, I am suffering so that men, who are my brothers, may be happy, not only in Heaven, but also – as far as possible – on earth, if they really embrace the most Holy Will of my heavenly Father.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: Avoiding the Hard Questions

Men, not having been able to cure death, misery and ignorance, have imagined to make themselves happy by not thinking of these things.

--Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 2

QUOTATION: Happiness

No one is really happy merely because he has what he wants, but only because if he wants things he ought to want.

--St. Augustine