There is nothing on earth more beautiful to me than your smile...no sound sweeter than your laughter...no pleasure greater than holding you in my arms. I realized today that I could never live without you, stubborn little hellion that you are. In this life and the next, you're my only hope of happiness. Tell me, Lillian, dearest love...how can you have reached so far inside my heart?

Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody-really want him-it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.

He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that ? everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

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; not to 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.

After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.

Happiness [is] only real when shared

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and-in spite of True Romance magazines-we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely-at least, not all the time-but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

Although images of perfection in people's personal lives can cause unhappiness images of perfect societies - utopian images - can cause monstrous evil. In fact forcefully changing society to conform to societal images was the greatest cause of evil in the twentieth century.

When a mother quarrels with a daughter she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter.

Caring for children is a dance between setting appropriate limits as caretakers and avoiding unnecessary power struggles that result in unhappiness.

Only after I faced the unhappiness of my first marriage did I start on the path of personal growth.

Seeing unhappiness in the marriage of friends I was content to have chosen music and laughter as a substitute for a husband.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Humor does not rescue us from unhappiness but enables us to move back from it a little.