Or we can define happiness this way: A happy person knows that good and bad come only from good or bad character. He values honor above all else. He's content with his own virtue. Good luck doesn't make him arrogant. Bad luck doesn't crush him. The only good he recognizes is what he can give himself. His real joy comes from not needing pleasures.
If you want to keep exploring this idea, you can say it many other ways without changing what it means. What's stopping us from saying that a happy life is simply a free mind? A mind that's honest, fearless, and steady. A mind that fear and desire can't touch. A mind that sees honor as the only good thing and shame as the only bad thing. Everything else — all those petty concerns — can't add to or subtract from real happiness. They come and go, but they never increase or decrease what truly matters.
Or we may choose to define it by calling that man happy who knows good and bad only in the form of good or bad minds: who worships honour, and is satisfied with his own virtue, who is neither puffed up by good fortune nor cast down by evil fortune, who knows no other good than that which he is able to bestow upon himself, whose real pleasure lies in despising pleasures. If you choose to pursue this digression further, you can put this same idea into many other forms, without impairing or weakening its meaning: for what prevents our saying that a happy life consists in a mind which is free, upright, undaunted, and steadfast, beyond the influence of fear or desire, which thinks nothing good except honour, and nothing bad except shame, and regards everything else as a mass of mean details which can neither add anything to nor take anything away from the happiness of life, but which come and go without either increasing or diminishing the highest good?