Quotes: Habit. Handwriting. Happiness.

The idea in bold-face print is a summary of the quote. The number after the topic is the page on which the quote was found.

Habit
Habit 349 "Habit is overcome by habit." Thomas A Kempis. 1420. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Habit 347 "Once is not a habit." French. Dictionary of Foreign Terms

Habit 381 Invective and charm lose their effectiveness if they are not spontaneous. "Again, invective which has become a habit is apt, like charm, to lose its virtue, for both depend for their effectiveness on spontaneity." Sir Desmond McCarthy. “Invective.” 1935. Gross, ed. Essays.

Handwriting
Handwriting 971 "…Southern gentlemen are more addicted to a flourish of the pen beneath their names, than those of the North." Hawthorne: “A Book of Autographs”

Happiness
Happiness 78 "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others." Albert Camus. 1956. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 87 We seek happiness in the flattery of people who don't give a damn about us. "We seek our happiness outside ourselves, and in the opinion of men whom we know to be flatterers, insincere, unjust, full of envy, caprice and prejudice. How absurd!" La Bruyere. 1688. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 166 "The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular reason for being happy except that they are so." W. R. Inge. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 166 "The sense of existence is the greatest happiness." Disraeli. 1832. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 166 A sense of knowledge is the greatest happiness. "What is more wonderful than the delight which the mind feels when it knows? …the satisfaction of a primary instinct." Mark Rutherford. 1915. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 167 "Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized." Chesterton. 1905. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 171 "The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Pascal. 1670. Gross, ed. Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

Happiness 133 Happiness: "An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." Ambrose Bierce. Portable Curmudgeon.

Happiness 133 "Happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember." Oscar Levant. Portable Curmudgeon.

Happiness 133 "Happiness is an imaginary condition…now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." Thomas Szasz. Portable Curmudgeon.

Happiness 133 "Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness." George Orwell. Portable Curmudgeon.

Happiness 134 "There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness." Aldous Huxley. Portable Curmudgeon.

Happiness 437 We seek unhappiness in order to become happy as a result. "…there does exist a possibility for reconciliation between our desires for impossible satisfactions and the simple unalterable fact that we also desire to be unhappy and that we create our own sufferings; and out of these sufferings we salvage our fragments of happiness." Katherine Anne Porter. “The Necessary Enemy.” 1948. Gross, ed. Essays.

Happiness 91 Marianne: "What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?" Elinor: "Grandeur has but little…but wealth has much to do with it." Austen, Sense and Sensibility.

Happiness 18 Death and happiness occur when we become part of something that is entire and complete. "I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more...was entirely happy; perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge; at any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great; when it [the experience of being part of something complete] comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." Cather, My Ántonia