Quotes About Happiness

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done

The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority." "The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?" "Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.

Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.

Americans, provides a surprisingly definite answer to the most frequently asked question in well-being research: Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one's life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being.

The gigantic samples allow extremely fine analyses, which have confirmed the importance of situational factors, physical health, and social contact in experienced well-being. Not surprisingly, a headache will make a person miserable, and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

I made myself smile and I'm actually feeling better!

One reason for the low correlations between individuals' circumstances and their satisfaction with life is that both experienced happiness and life satisfaction are largely determined by the genetics of temperament. A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence, as demonstrated by studies of twins separated at birth.

plausible interpretation is that higher income is associated with a reduced ability to enjoy the small pleasures of life. There is suggestive evidence in favor of this idea: priming students with the idea of wealth reduces the pleasure their face expresses as they eat a bar of chocolate!

It's a wonderful thing to be optimistic. It keeps you healthy and it keeps you resilient.

We found that American women spent about 19% of the time in an unpleasant state, somewhat higher than French women (16%) or Danish women (14%).

The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of well-being, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self.

the word happiness does not have a simple meaning and should not be used as if it does. Sometimes scientific progress leaves us more puzzled than we were before.

They found that putting the participants in a good mood before the test by having them think happy thoughts more than doubled accuracy. An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition.

The neglect of duration combined with the peak-end rule causes a bias that favors a short period of intense joy over a long period of moderate happiness.

We cannot hold a concept of well-being that ignores what people want

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "La alegría, la emoción o la satisfacción son más importantes en Occidente que en Oriente, donde se aprecia más la calma" (Daniel Kahneman)

I don't know what's worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be, and feel alone.

It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect.

TO BE HAPPY, BE VIRTUOUS. THERE ARE ONLY TWO REASONS TO EVER DO ANYTHING; TO BE HAPPY, AND TO HELP OTHER PEOPLE BE HAPPY. ALL VIRTUE LIES IN THE SECOND HALF OF THAT, IN WORKING FOR OTHERS, IN PROTECTING THE WEAK FROM THE STRONG.

This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus , in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.

An avowed anti-Catholic, Maurice Maeterlinck, the twentieth-century Belgian philosopher and playwright, weighed in with: "An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

little world": "The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate, and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.

The critical point is that knowing we can always get higher can be a real downer. It informs us that we are never going to reach the ultimate point of happiness because there is no ultimate point of happiness.