Happiness - what exactly is it and where I can get some? These two simple questions have remained unanswered despite all our efforts. Poets bicker about the definition of happiness, scientists try to determine how happiness works, and politicians promise all the happiness you can handle if you vote for them. The Declaration of Independence calls the pursuit of happiness one of the three unalienable rights, but how exactly do you go about pursuing it?

This book collects 50 essays, poems, philosophical discourses, aphorisms and snarky comments from great thinkers of our past. They include famous names (Mark Twain, Socrates, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller and others), as well as some that you've probably never heard of. (Christina, Queen of Sweden, just might have been the wittiest 17th-century monarch.)

The 50 perspectives on happiness collected in this volume range from goofy to serious, from optimistic to morbid. No matter what your philosophical disposition, this book is guaranteed to help you with your own, personal pursuit of happiness. It'll make you laugh, it'll make you think, it might even make you cry. The "50 shades of yay" can do all of that - and much, much more.