Quotes About Happiness

This self-knowledge is crucial because we can build a happy life only on the foundation of our own nature, our own interests, and our own values.

Instead of contradicting pessimistic or negative statements, acknowledge them. Happiness leeches are often less emphatic when they feel that others recognize their views. • Act the way I want to feel; behave the way I want to behave. Too

In particular, I'd realized that although I possessed all the elements of a happy life, too often I took my circumstances for granted and allowed myself to become overly vexed by petty annoyances or fleeting worries. I'd wanted to appreciate my life more, and to live up to it better.

William Butler Yeats. "Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

The driving didn't make me happier, but successfully taking steps to conquer my fear made me very happy.

course it's not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy

Happiness depends partly on external circumstances, and it also depends on how you view those circumstances

It is by studying little things," wrote Samuel Johnson, "that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.

But perhaps the most acute sense of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea - the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.

One highly effective way to practice mindfulness is through meditation, which is recommended by Buddhists as a spiritual exercise and also by happiness experts of all sorts. Nevertheless

Remember, the reason to clear clutter is because, somehow, that clutter is diminishing your happiness. If you don't care, don't bother.

Everyone's happiness project is unique.

would seek happiness in the ways that seemed most natural to me.

Studies show that in a phenomenon called "emotional contagion," we unconsciously catch emotions from other people—whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we're infecting one another with good cheer, and people who enjoy silliness are one third more likely to be happy. As

couldn't just jump into this happiness project. I had a lot to learn before I was ready for my year to begin. After my first few weeks of heavy reading, as I toyed with different ideas about how to set up my experiment, I called my younger sister, Elizabeth. After

It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.

To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn't hard to understand.

And a sense of purpose is very important to happiness. But

Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process

striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.

It takes work to be happier, but it's gratifying work.

The Levity Effect

Epicurus agreed, albeit in slightly more poetic phraseology: Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Exercise for sanity not vanity.