I’ve been traveling in Europe these past couple of weeks with my husband.

Whenever we reach a new town or state, we get extremely excited; however, after a few days, our happiness dissipates and we automatically get excited about the next place.

When we were walking the streets of Bordeaux yesterday for the first time, we both chuckled and told each other that our walk tomorrow might not feel the same.

This is our nature as human beings. No matter what we have or where we are, we are never truly satisfied. We’re constantly looking for the next thing, hoping it might make us happier.

But will the next thing really make us happier?

According to Buddhism—and many spiritual teachers—happiness isn’t a destination. We can never find it in a person, place, event, or object. Everything that’s outside of us is highly unpredictable; it’s temporary and constantly changing. That said, tying our happiness to someone or something might disappoint us after all.

How can we fix this flawed idea? These 13 quotes might inspire us to stop pursuing everlasting joy:

1. “It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.” ~ Dale Carnegie

2. “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” ~ Albert Camus

3. “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” ~ Orson Welles

4. “Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5. “Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes—they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice…The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don’t give a damn.” ~ Agatha Christie

6. “If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.” ~ Taisen Deshimaru

7. “Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.” ~ George Orwell

8. “If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.” ~ Edith Wharton

9. “They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” ~ Tom Bodett

10. “Act as if you were already happy and that will tend to make you happy.” ~ Dale Carnegie

11. “I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” ~ Groucho Marx

12. “We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor…Millions will always remain poor.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

13. “A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.” ~ Albert Einstein

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