Quotes About Well-being

It's amazing how much easier it is to think productively when your belly is full.

The thing is, it's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

You can never pay too much for peace of mind.

me and a score of slackers, comfortably isolated from the world, attaining our own brand of holiday well-being, no gifts, no Christ child, no tinsel or mistletoe, only a sense of complete freedom.

Good and true friends ask what wrong and how your doing.

Man does not live by GNP alone.

I want to talk about happiness and well being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, "High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other's well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

turns out that one can screw up being happy by trying to be happy—or at least by trying to be happy in the wrong way.

It turns out that pursuing extrinsic goals related to praise and reward—looking attractive, making money, and building up social status—makes you less happy and less fulfilled, and is linked with more depression, anxiety, and mental illness.

Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "What constitutes a good life? . . . Flow research has yielded one answer, providing an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment. Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does" (italics theirs). But this is actually a poor answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. Flow can be trivial.

We are not built to be happy. Evolution doesn't want us to be in constant bliss any more than it wants us to be pain-free. Pain is information about what's wrong and an inducement to make things better. Sadness and loneliness and shame play similar roles.

Consider the effects of money. When it comes to experienced happiness, more money makes you happier. This makes sense. Money can buy you positive experiences and can make your life better in all sorts of ways. More to the point, being poor makes everything worse—as the authors put it, "Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone.

It turns out that for experienced happiness, money matters only up to an annual income of about $75,000. (This study was done in 2010, so we might adjust that to $89,000 for inflation.) Apparently, the day-to-day experiences of a well-off person and a very rich person aren't that different,

This point is worth emphasizing, since there seems to be an urban legend that money, at least past a certain point, doesn't make much of a difference in the quality of your life or even makes you miserable. This just isn't so.

Treating a disease and treating a person are very different concerns, because recovery depends in large part on the mind and spirit of the patient. Suffering, a state of mind, involves the entire person.

With our natural intelligence – super health, happiness and longevity should be the rule instead of the exception.

As an economist, I have learned that decentralized, market-based competition – the vital core of capitalism – is the only way to deliver prosperity, but what are the founts of the other aspects of well-being? Whereas economic man is presumed to be lazy, purposive action such as work is important for esteem.

The distinguished psychologist Martin Seligman has conducted a sustained programme of research on the attainment of well-being. His conclusion is unambiguous: 'If you want well-being, you will not get it if you only care about accomplishment . . . Close personal relationships are not everything in life, but they are central.'14

Some women find it near impossible to rest because they equate taking a break with being selfish. But Jesus sequestered himself from others to get some much needed rest and refreshment. Drivers who push themselves too hard for too long become a hazard to others. You have the freedom (and the responsibility) to rest.

Being a worshiper means that you attach your identity, your meaning and purpose, and your inner sense of well-being to something. You either get these things vertically (from the Creator) or you look to get them horizontally (from the creation). This insight has everything to do with how a marriage becomes what it is. No marriage will be unaffected when the people in the marriage are seeking to get from the creation what they were only ever meant to get from the Creator.

Here's what happens to us all - we seek horizontally for the personal rest that we are to find vertically, and it never works. Looking to others for your inner sense of well-being is pointless.