Happiness if I am right, lies in two things: being exactly where one belongs – but what official can say that of himself? – and especially, performing comfortably the most commonplace functions, that is having enough sleep and not having new boots, that pinch. When the 720 minutes of the twelve-hour day pass without any special annoyance that can be called a happy day.

(Translation from German – William A.Cooper )

Theodor Fontane | Effi Briest, 1894

Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!… 

Fyodor Dostoevski |Crime and Punishment

… I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that – as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens