Quotes About Happiness

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.

no matter how much a person has, it may not be enough.

Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one's choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.

Following the other suggestions I've made may sometimes mean that when judged by an absolute standard, the results of decisions will be less good than they might otherwise have been—all the more reason to fight the tendency to make social comparisons. So: Remember that "He who dies with the most toys wins" is a bumper sticker, not wisdom. Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.

While maximizers and perfectionists both have very high standards, I think that perfectionists have very high standards that they don't expect to meet, whereas maximizers have very high standards that they do expect to meet. Which may explain why we found that those who score high on perfectionism, unlike maximizers, are not depressed, regretful, or unhappy.

As the magnitude of the gain increases, the amount of additional satisfaction people get out of each additional unit decreases. The shape of this curve conforms to what economists have long talked about as the "law of diminishing marginal utility." As the rich get richer, each additional unit of wealth satisfies them less.

Both books point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. But they go further. Both books argue that we are actually experiencing a fairly significant decrease in well-being.

Once a society's level of per capita wealth crosses a threshold from poverty to adequate subsistence, further increases in national wealth have almost no effect on happiness.

Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.

But if money doesn´t do it for people, what does? What seems to be the most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations. People who are married, who have good friends and who are close to their families are happier than those who are not. Being connected to other seems to be much more important to subjective well-being than being rich.

What seems likely to me is that the causality works both ways: happy people attract other to them, and being with others makes people happy.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

The right path leads to Elysium, the place of eternal happiness, but "the left-hand path torments / the wicked, leading down to Tartarus, path to doom" (Aeneid, Book 6, lines 631–32).

I was daily his delight,                  Rejoicing before him always,            Rejoicing in his inhabited world                  And delighting in the human race.

Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me. This is how it happens sometimes, misery or joy engulfs me, without any particular tumult ensuing : nor any pathos: I am dissolved, not dismembered; I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts grazed, touched, tested (the way you test the water with your foot)--can recur

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge. — Robert Henri

No,' he said. 'I don't think anyone dies happy...but you could die well.

Friendships founded on laughter are always fortuitous.

How we danced! - Sadie

Shiny happy people don't hold guns in their laps that way.

As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub's line, not mine), You can never be too thin or too rich. And if you don't believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.

No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.

All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.