Quotes About Well-being

HERE'S HOW MY OXFORD DICTIONARY DEFINES IT: "The spasmodic utterance, facial distortion, shaking of the sides, etc., which form the instinctive impression of mirth." To me this sounds like the array of symptoms caused by a lethal virus, but it's actually a description of one of the best things life has to offer: laughter. With certain exceptions, the Joy Diet requires you to do it at least thirty times a day.

So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you – look at the burnish of you.

Research has found perceiving nature's beauty to be a significant predictor of life satisfaction. In other words, the more one perceived nature's beauty, the more one reported life satisfaction.

women need solitude in our lives to refill our well and garner strength to face life's deeper questions.

Doing good does us good.

Empathy plays a crucial role in the reduction of stress from the moment of birth.

In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone.

Pleasure and well-being is negative and suffering positive, the happiness of a given life is not to be measured according to the joys and pleasures it contains but according to the absence of the positive element, the absence of suffering.

Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.

The negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain.

For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health

and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Aristotle says, To be happy means to be self-sufficient.

We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love.

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix.

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.

The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer.

It is much harder to measure how much more worth people find in being alive than how many fewer drugs they depend on or how much longer they can live. But could anything matter more?

We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way.

La gente quiere compartir sus recuerdos, transmitir su sabiduría y sus objetos personales, arreglar las relaciones, establecer sus legados, ponerse en paz con Dios y asegurarse de que las personas que deja atrás van a estar bien. Quieren finalizar su historia en sus propios términos.

We end up with institutions that address societal goals-from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly-but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves

The question therefore is... how can we build a health care system that will actually help people achieve what's most important to them at the end of their lives

spine tips your head forward," he said to me. "So when you look straight ahead it's like looking up at the ceiling for anyone else. Try to swallow while looking up: you'll choke once in a while.