The key to happiness
Humans have been chasing happiness for eons. We can see it in our songs, paintings, and history books. We can see an all-too-familiar question: What’s happiness really?
Many people’s answer to the question is love. When we hear a true-life story about the power love has to overcome any obstacle, it’s difficult to disagree. They show us that by overcoming the challenging and materialistic pursuits of life, we can find ourselves living a life of love and contentment.
Someone said money is also the key to the happiness. Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can’t. Money does mater to your sense of happiness, but it doesn’t mater too much. Beyond the point at which people have enough to comfortable feed, clothe, and house themselves lives having more money, even a lot more money, makes them only a little bit happier. 
It’s funny, everyone keeps saying money doesn’t make you happier, but money can change the world. It can support palatial candidates, it can drive change. And it can’t buy love, but it can certainly get you to meet people and have dates. 
For deep-seated psychological reason, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.
The money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met, that marriage and faith lead to happiness. Maybe the key to the good life lies not in rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but in an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.
And what makes people unhappy? The causes of the various kinds of unhappiness lie partly in individual psychology, which is, of course, itself, to a considerable extent, a product of the social system. The unhappiness has no obvious external cause, it appears in
escapable. I believe this unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, and mistaken habits of life all leading to the destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends.
The typical unhappy man is one who having been deprived in youth of some normal satisfaction, has come to value this one kind of satisfaction more than any other, and has therefore given his life a one-sided direction, together with a quite undue emphasis upon achievement as opposed to the activities connected with it. There is, however, a further development which is very common in the present day. A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of “pleasure.” That is to say he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. For the man who seeks intoxication, in whatever form, has given up hope except in oblivion. In his case, the first thing to be done is to persuade him that happiness is, in fact, desirable.
earnest
Happiness is something everyone wants to have. You may be successful and have a lot of money, but without Happiness it will be meaningless.
But, before we move further, it’s a good idea to get deeper understanding of the word happiness itself. Understanding what Happiness is will give us good ground upon which to build our discussions.
Let me start with an official definition. here is the definition of Happiness: a state of well-being and contentment， a pleasurable or satisfying experience
This definition is a good starting point and we can dig deeper from it. The best way to do that is to consult some of the greatest minds in history. So I researched what these people say about Happiness and found 10 essential definitions. Each of them has deep meaning.
Here they are:
1. Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. Mahatma Gandhi
2. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
3. Happiness is something that you are and it comes from the way you think. Wayne Dyer
4. Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.
William H. Sheldon
5. Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Robert Ingersoll
6. Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing. George Sheehan
7. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. Aristotle
8. Happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember. Oscar Levant
9. Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling. Margaret Lee Runback

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