x "Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste."
— Charlotte Brontë, who was born today, on the 21st April 1816

x "… The most visible happiness
only reveals itself when we’ve changed it, within."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Seventh Elegy, in Duino Elegies, translated by E. Snow

x "There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist."
— Fernando Pessoa, from A Factless Autobiography (translated by R. Zenith)

Happiness

Again I’m trying to explain how all talk is slippery.

See, I might want to convey one thing—frustration, say—
but all that gets conveyed is some other thing—rage—my hand
coming fast, erratic, menacing.

Who can say how a thing in words turns and flowers like that?
It happens.

Now say I want to say to you happiness.

No motive. Nothing behind it.
Just the awareness of a valve suddenly opened and—
happiness!

It’s in the lungs, the bones.
But somehow all you hear is I don’t need you.

We’re in this room, and you’re not hearing
how I’m still trying to say this thing to you.

I’ll say it again. Here. Happiness.

Elisabeth Frost

(Source: poems.com)