These words refer to states of well-being or to the pleasurable satisfaction that accompanies such states. Happiness is the most general term and may imply any degree of well-being from that of mere contentment or absence of sorrow to the most intense joy and sense of fulfilment. Felicity is a more formal and less often used term for great and sustained happiness: All men by nature seek ease of mind, but few can hope for unending felicity . The word is most often used of a happy faculty for an effective manner or style: a felicity of poetic expression.

Gladness is overflowing happiness and suggests an emotional reaction to a pleasant event, rather than a sustained state of mind: Her gladness at seeing us again was most touching.

Bliss in its commonest meaning points to complete, ecstatic happiness or to great contentment: the bliss of a young couple in love; the bliss experienced by a cat stretching in the sun. In the religious sense, bliss is a state of absolute felicity brought about by the submergence of the self into a divine infinity, as in the state of nirvana in Buddhism.

Blessedness and beatitude usually refer to intense spiritual bliss . Blessedness implies a happiness so profound as to be attributed to a deity or to unusually favourable fortune. Beatitude , a more formal and literary word, is supreme blessedness that approaches the transcendent. Its most familiar use is its application to the eight declarations of blessedness (the Beatitude ) occurring in the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament.