Quotes from Gretchen Rubin

Nothing is more exhausting than the task that's never started.

I have an idea of who I wish I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am. Sometimes I pretend even to myself to enjoy activities that I don't really enjoy, such as shopping, or to be interested in subjects that don't much interest me, such as foreign policy.

There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it's not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.

I have an idea of who I wish I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am.

When it comes to fake food, I'm like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult." In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can't indulge occasionally.

Nothing is more exhausting than the task that's never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.

I'm not tempted by things I've decided are off-limits, but once I've started something, I have trouble stopping. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.

Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness. p 169

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.

I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar.

Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.

Time waits for no ovary.

It's a Secret of Adulthood: I can't make people change, but when I change, others may change; and when others change, I may change.

The happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren't those from a particular Tendency, but rather they're the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their Tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build the lives that work for them.

It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. —GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier

I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.

I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play The Blue Bird, where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.

Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive." And whatever liberates our spirit while giving us mastery over ourselves is constructive.

Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.

The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn't be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.

With habits, we don't make decisions, we don't use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don't want to do.

You hit> a goal, you keep a resolution.

Outer order isn't a matter of having less or having more; it's a matter of wanting what we have.