Quotes from Gordon Livingston

Money cannot buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.

There are no maps to guide our most important searches; we must rely on hope, chance, intuition, and a willingness to be surprised.

Life's two most important questions are Why? and Why not? The trick is knowing which one to ask.

The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. Think about it.

To imagine that we are solely, or even primarily, responsible for the successes and failures of our children is a narcissistic myth.

manual of virtuous character traits that describes qualities to nurture in ourselves and to seek in our friends and lovers. At the top of the list would be kindness, a willingness to give of oneself to another. This most desirable of virtues governs all the others, including a capacity for empathy and love. Like other forms of art, we may find it hard to define, but when we are in its presence, we feel it.

The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas.

If the map doesn't agree with the ground the map is wrong

The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to.

any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

It is our determination to overcome fear and discouragement that constitutes the only effective antidote to the sense of powerlessness over unwanted feelings.

Our common future will be determined by the struggle between the killers and the peacemakers.

This is the map we wish to construct in our heads: a reliable guide that allows us to avoid those who are not worthy of our time and trust and to embrace those who are. The best indications that our always-tentative maps are faulty include feelings of sadness, anger, betrayal, surprise, and disorientation.

Our feelings depend mainly on our interpretation of what is happening to us and around us—our attitudes. It is not so much what occurs, but how we define events and respond that determines how we feel. The thing that characterizes those who struggle emotionally is that they have lost, or believe they have lost, their ability to choose those behaviors that will make them happy.

We are responsible for most of what happens to us.

life consists of an effort to get the maps in our heads to conform to the ground on which we walk.

We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do.

illuminated where I stood so I could better see myself and the world around me, and then he took that light and held it out so I could see the footholds and ledges I would need to reclaim a productive life.

Most of the heartbreak that life contains is a result of ignoring the reality that past behavior is the most reliable predictor of future behavior.

Many of us are afraid of risk and prefer the bland, the predictable, and the repetitive. This explains the overwhelming sense of boredom that is a defining characteristic of our age.

To be happy is to take the risk of losing that happiness.

The stories of our lives, far from being fixed narratives, are under constant revision. The slender threads of causality are rewoven and reinterpreted as we attempt to explain to ourselves and others how we became the people we are.

everything in life is a good news/bad news story.