Quotes About Happiness

joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

Pero si una persona se toma unos momentos para reflexionar, el desencanto vuelve: tras cada éxito se ve con mayor claridad que el dinero, el poder, la posición social y las posesiones, por sí mismas, no añaden ni un ápice a la calidad de vida.

Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.

Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did. Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them.

el más alto bien, que llamaba alegría, y frecuentemente confianza, es una mente desprovista de temor». En otras palabras, disfrutó de la vida porque había aprendido a controlar su conciencia. Demócrito no fue ni el primer ni el último pensador que se perdió en el flujo de la mente. Frecuentemente

Yet such blows do not necessarily diminish happiness. It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.

aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man's Search for Meaning: "Don't aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It

Esta paradoja de las expectativas en alza sugiere que mejorar la calidad de vida es una tarea inacabable.

To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.

So the first step in improving the quality of life consists in engineering daily activities so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them.

In the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery--or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the contents of life--that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

Unfortunately, many people find the only challenges they can respond to are violence, gambling, random sex, or drugs. Some of these experiences can be enjoyable, but these episodes of flow do not add up to a sense of satisfaction and happiness over time. Pleasure does not lead to creativity, but soon turns into addiction—the thrall of entropy.

It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that one of the problems we face at this point in history is that we haven't learned how to spend free time in a sensible way.

the secret to a happy life is to learn to get flow from as many of the things we have to do as possible.

Suffering is not bad: It helps you very much. Do you know a novel about happiness? Or a film about happy people? We are a perverse race, only suffering interests us.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.

Passive leisure becomes a problem when a person uses it as the principal-or the only-strategy to fill up free time.

success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.