Quotes About Well-being

Or even Winston Churchill, who took naps throughout the Second World War, thereby giving himself "two mornings" every day (Sharpen the Saw).

we all have basic needs and capacities that are fundamental to human fulfillment.

Nietzsche: "He who has a 'why' can live with any 'what.'" Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision.

This is the single most powerful investment we can ever make in life—investment in ourselves, in the only instrument we have with which to deal with life and to contribute. We are the instruments of our own performance, and to be effective, we need to recognize the importance of taking time regularly to sharpen the saw in all four ways.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase "conventional wisdom." He did not consider it a compliment. "We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most

We associate truth with convenience," he wrote, "with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.

This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.

happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent

psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.

countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness

it's a fallacy to think that people "need resources" in the first place.17 They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, displaying information, and other sources of well-being. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want.

The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.

Graphs like figure 5-2 display a triumph of human well-being whose magnitude the mind cannot begin to comprehend.

And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

people are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.

the theory of the hedonic treadmill

Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it's a good problem to have.

The human moral sense can also work at cross-purposes to our well-being.26 People demonize those they disagree with, attributing differences of opinion to stupidity and dishonesty. For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing.

Door aan het licht te brengen dat de wetten die in het universum gelden geen doel hebben, dwingen wetenschappelijke krachten ons verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor ons eigen welzijn, onze soort en onze planeet.

The economist Steven Radelet has pointed out that "the improvements in health among the global poor in the last few decades are so large and widespread that they rank among the greatest achievements in human history.

For one thing, empathy can subvert human well-being when it runs afoul of a more fundamental principle, fairness. Batson found that when people empathized with Sheri, a ten-year-old girl with a serious illness, they also opted for her to jump a queue for medical treatment ahead of other children who had waited longer or needed it more. Empathy would have consigned these children to death and suffering because they were nameless and faceless.