Quotes About Happiness

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including the conditions of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and so even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.

The average person might well be no happier today than in 1800. Even the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbors, but they can choose to leave us.

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, is it wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men? Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry?

When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate

Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.

On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don't become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

Given the proven human propensity for misusing power, it seems naïve to believe that the more clout people have, the happier they will be.

Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.

When Epicurus defined happiness as the supreme good, he warned his disciples that it is hard work to be happy.

Having saved people from abject misery, we will now aim to make them positively happy. And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.

Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

Sin embargo, en las últimas décadas, la situación se ha invertido, y la visión de Bentham se ha tomado mucho más en serio. Cada vez más gente cree que los inmensos sistemas establecidos hace más de un siglo para fortalecer la nación deberían en verdad estar al servicio de la felicidad y el bienestar de los ciudadanos. No estamos aquí para servir al Estado: él está aquí para servirnos.

A person who does not crave cannot suffer. According

People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found (or never sought) a community to be part of.

buying more stuff will make us happy, because we saw the capitalist paradise with our own eyes on television.

At the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, pilgrims were greeted by the inscription: 'Know thyself!' The implication was that the average person is ignorant of his true self, and is therefore likely to be ignorant of true happiness. Freud would probably concur.*

we can make people far happier than ever before, without any need of revolutions. Prozac, for example, does not change regimes, but by raising serotonin levels it lifts people out of their depression.

Without government planning, economic resources and scientific research, individuals will not get far in their quest for happiness.

Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology. But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss?

happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe's reservoirs of contentment