Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.

The summit of pleasure is the elimination of all that gives pain.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Some of the happiest people I know have none of the things the world insists are necessary for satisfaction and joy.

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.