Happiness: Compilation

Happiness is a condition of gladness, sense of inner ease and welfare, contentment, a sunlit life—it is more quiet in its nature than joy and delight.

Happiness in the ordinary sense is a sunlit state of the vital with or without cause.

Happy heart: smiling, peaceful, wide open, without a shadow.

…[For a happy and comfortable life] most people would always choose the same thing. Generally speaking, the most common ideal is to be born in an environment comfortable enough to avoid too many difficulties in life, to marry someone who won’t give you too much trouble, to have healthy children who grow up normally—again to avoid trouble—and then a quiet and happy old age, and not be too ill, again to avoid trouble. And then to pass away when one is tired of life, again because one does not want any trouble.

Happiness and success bringing happiness are, no doubt, a legitimate demand of humanity; it is an attempt of life and matter to catch a pale reflection or a gross image of felicity: but a superficial happiness and material success, however desirable to our vital nature, are not the main object of our existence…

Happiness is not the aim of life.

The aim of human life is to discover the Divine and to manifest it. Naturally this discovery leads to happiness; but this happiness is a consequence, not an aim in itself. And it is this mistake of taking a mere consequence for aim of life that has been the cause of most of the miseries which are afflicting human life.

Spiritual happiness: calm and smiling, nothing can disturb it.

Real happiness is of divine origin; it is pure and unconditioned.

Spiritual joy or a deep inner happiness (not disturbed even when there come superficial storms or perturbations) is a constant concomitant of contact or union with the Divine…

It is a fact that this inner gladness and happiness is something peaceful and happy at once—it is not an excited movement like the vital outward pleasure, though it can be more ardent and intense.

There is a quietude and happiness which you can find by living in yourself in contact with the Divine which you will never get from outside.

Indeed, true happiness is the happiness one can feel in any circumstances whatsoever, because it comes from regions which cannot be affected by any external circumstances. But this happiness is accessible to a very few individuals, and most of the human race is still subject to terrestrial conditions.

It [Divine Grace] is not and cannot be ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker terms or still less a guidance which brings us solely and always nothing but happiness, success and good fortune. Its main concern is with the growth of our being and consciousness, the growth towards a higher self, towards the Divine, eventually towards a highest Light, Truth and Bliss; the rest is secondary, sometimes a means, sometimes a result, not a primary purpose.