For in the end happiness is what all people want, regardless of the many ways they may seek it. To be happy is the ultimate goal of all ambition, all endeavor, all hopes, and plans. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence," declared Aristotle, supreme philosopher of the ancient world.

But what is happiness? clearly, it means vastly different things to different people. Since earliest times men have sought and found their happiness along amazingly divergent paths-in work, achievement, success, in love and family ties, in the affection of friends, in religion.

There is one point, however, on which philosophers in every age agree: true happiness stems from a quality within ourselves, from a way of thinking of life. Of all the millions of words written on happiness, this is the oldest and most enduring truth. If the principles of contentment are are not within us, no material success, no pleasure or possessions, can make us happy.

The philosophy has been expounded by writers and thinkers since civilization began; but never more beautifully and effectively than in Maeterlinck's famous play, The blue Bird. Tyltyl and Myty, the woodcutter's children, search for happiness, only to find it on their return home. ("We went so far, and it was here all the time!") It isn't necessary to search for happiness in far places, says Maeterlinck in the Blue Bird. It is everywhere around you and about you. The quest for happiness is always in vain unless you can find it within yourself, within your own heart and soul.

"Very little is needed to make a happy life," wrote Marcus Aurelius in his immortal Meditations." It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."

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Lillian Eichler Watson

• The Mintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust, and that real life is in love, laughter, and work.

elbert Hubbard 

• To awaken each morning with a smile brightening my face; to greet the day with reverence for the opportunities it contains; to approach my work with  a clean mind; to hold ever before me, even in the doing of little things, the Ultimate Purpose toward which I am working; to meet men and women with laughter on my lips and love in my heart; to be gentle, kind, and courteous through all the hours; to approach the night with weariness that ever woos sleep and the joy that comes from work well done- this is how I desire to waste wisely my days..

Thomas Dekker 

• Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know.

Charles Kingsley 

• Happiness, I have discovered, is always a rebound from hard work.

David Grayson 

• Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abraham Lincoln

• Work and thou canst not escape the reward; whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought. No matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

• Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are who already possess it.

Francois de La Rochefoucsuld  

• He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Epictetus