Happiness emerges from being fully sentient and fully alive, which only means that it comes with being a sufferer. Which raises the question: Is it a weakness to want happiness? In some categorical sense, the answer is obviously no. But it is if we want it like a drug, if we feel anger or betrayal when it slips from our hands, if we feel that it is something we can control or demand.

George Handley, "Patience in Suffering"

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to  a condition of optimal joyfulness.  They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.  Operating in harmony with those realities, as a swimmer who works with the current rather than against it, empowers and liberates us to fill the measure of our creation. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 83

True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.

-Ben Jonson