HAPPINESS:  The Best collection of quotes on the most important and misunderstood subject

 

 

Everyone speaks of it, few know it."

-Mme Jeanne P. Roland

 

 

"Spend the day merrily!

Put ointment and fine oil to your nostrils

And lotus flowers on the body

of your beloved....

Spend the day merrily

And weary not therein,

Lo, none can take his goods with him.

Lo, none that has departed can return again."

(4000 year old Egyptian)

 

Reason and sense remove anxiety,

Not villas that look out upon the sea

Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do

not leave us when we change our country.

Some said to Socrates that a certain man had

grown no better by his travels. "I should think not," he said; "he took himself along with him....."

We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude....

Horace

 

"Empty your golden glasses to the dregs,

Life is dark, so is death."

-Li T'Ai-PO   Chinese Poet 8th century A.D.

 

 

"Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensure."

-Viktor Frankl

 

 

"Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life."

-Marcus Aurelius  Roman Emperor & Philosopher

 

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."

-Helen Keller

 

"The history of empires is that of men's misery. The history of the sciences is that of their grandeur and happiness."

-Edward Gibbon, 1761

 

"No matter how hard you work to better yourself, you can't possibly be happy while the people around you are down. It's plain common sense then to start out with making others happy"

-Rick Strauss  

How to Win Games and Influence Destiny, Vols I & II

 

 

"....a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living-that despite our circumstances, no key ingredient of happiness is missing. With this sense comes a diminished level of anxiety; we no longer need to obsess over the things-a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen-that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly, if we master desire, to the extent possible to do so, we will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead, we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."

-William B.Irvine

On Desire: Why We Want What We Want

 

 

"I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear."

-The Dalai Lama

 

 

"The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do  it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of he children of Adam.
-R.H. Tawney

 

 

 

"The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose."

-John Mason Brown

 

 

"The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing cuple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."

-Nabokov

 

"The Secret Of contentment is the discovery by every man of his own powers and limitations, finding satisfaction in a line of activity which he can do well, plus the wisdom to know that his place, no matter how important or successful he is, never counts very much in the universe.....The courage of being one's genuine self, of standing alone and of not wanting to be somebody else."

-Lin Yutang

 

 

"No evil man is happy"   Nemo malus felix

-Juvenal

 

"Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose."
-William Couper

 

 

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

 

"It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump."

-Pascal

 

"Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so."

-John Stuart Mill

 

"Do what you love. Know your own bone. Gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still"

-Henry David Thoreau

 

 

"And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue-liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

-Aldous Huxley

 

 

"When a man has lost all happiness he's not alive. Call him a breathing corpse."

-Sophocles

 

 

"Men love themselves; they all desire to be happy, and think their happiness would be complete, if they were invested with a degree of power sufficient to procure them every sort of pleasure."

-Claud-Adrian Helvetius

 

 

"The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us-of becoming happy-is not attainable; yet we may not-nay, cannot-give up the effort to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other."

-Sigmund Freud

 

"There are four kinds of people in the world: those in love, the ambitious, the observers, and the stupid. The most happy are the stupid."

-Hippolyte Taine

 

"People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads. blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old-bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us."

-William MakePeace Thackery

 

 

"One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness."

-Albert Camus

 

"Feeling blue? Doctors now say you can lie yourself into happiness. by creating self-deceptions, no matter how negative (your problem), it can be turned into a positive and you'll have greater (happiness)."

-Radio Advertisement

 

 

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action."

-Disraeli

 

"Happiness pursued eludes, happiness given returns."

-Sir John Templeton

 

"The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past."

-Andre Maurois

 

 

"Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all."

-Ovid

 

 

Contemputus mundi-the beginning of Philosophy

"After experience had taught me that all things which regularly occur in ordinary life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except insofar as the the mind is affected by them, I resolved at last to find out whether there was anything which would be True good, which would effect the mind singularly to the exclusion of all else: whether there was something which once found and acquired, would give me continuous, supreme, and enduring happiness."

-Spinoza

 

 

"No man is really happy or safe without a hobby and it makes precious little difference what the outside interest may be-botany, beetles or butterflies; roses, tulips or irises; fishing, mountaineering or antiquities-anything will do so long as he straddles a hobby and rides it hard."

-Sir William Osler

 

 

"In 1973, a special task force in Massachusetts reported to the Secretary of H.E.W. their findings on the likelihood of survival from atherosclerotic heart disease. They found the most reliable factor in determining survival was not smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, or high blood cholesterol levels, but job satisfaction. And the second overall best predictor was what the task force termed "overall happiness."

-Larry Dossey M.D

Space, Time & Medicine

 

 

"To crave happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?"

-Henrick Ibsen

 

 

"Talk happiness. The world is sad enough without your woe."

-Orison Swett Marden

 

"Happy talk and wishful thinking, are for children, fools, and leftists."

-John Derbyshire

We Are Doomed

 

 

 

"Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

-Aristotle

 

 

"Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure-attractively packaged but inferior in content."

-Alan Watts

 

 

"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame."

-Willa Cather, "Le Lavandous," 1902

 

 

 

"Sometimes happiness is a blessing, but, generally, it is a conquest. Each day's magic moment helps us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams."

-Paulo Coelho

 

 

 

"People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things."

-Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D

.

 

"As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve; and life begins to flow with joy and ease."

-Eckhart Tolle

 

 

"The Habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions"

-Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

 

"If you cannot be happy in one way, be in another; this facility of disposition wants but little aid from philosophy, for health and good humor are almost the whole affair. Many run about after felicity, like an absent-minded man hunting for his hat, while it in his hand or on his head."

-William Sharp

 

 

"The plan of creation does not provide for man's being happy."

-Freud

 

"The Creator has brought us too far on the road to happiness to abandon us now."

-George Washington

 

 

"A certain amount of boredom is....essential to a happy life."

-Bertrand Russell

 

 

"The first step to living wisely is to relinquish self-conceit."

-Epictetus

 

 

"Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading."

-Rufus Choate

 

 

"To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something."

-C.P. Gilman

 

 

"If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are."

-Montesquieu

 

 

"Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely a spectacle that it affords, untroubled by the thoughts of death because he feels himself not really separated from those who come after him. It is in such a profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found."

-Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

 

   "True happiness is a verb. It's the ongoing dynamic performance of worthy deeds. The flourishing life, whose foundation is virtuous intention, is something we continually improvise, and in doing so our souls mature. Our life has usefulness to ourselves and to the people we touch."

--Epictetus   A.D. 70

 

 

"Ours are ominous times. Each nervous glance portends some potential disaster. Paranoia most mornings shocks us to wakefulness, and we totter out under the ghostly sun. At night fear agitates the darkness."

-Eric G. Wilson

Against Happiness

 

 

"Happiness Pursued Eludes,

Happiness Given Returns."

-Sir John Templeton

 

"it is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, but it is not possible to find it elsewhere."

-Agnes Repplier

 

 

"Happiness is in the taste, and not in the things themselves. it is by having what we like that we are made happy, not by having what others think desirable."

-Francois De La Rochefoucauld

 

 

"Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it."

--Maurice Maeterlinck

 

 

"Happiness is a kind of gratitude."

-Joseph Wood Krutch

 

"Happiness depends upon ourselves."

-Aristotle

 

"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which the this world affords."

-Samuel Johnson

 

"Don't mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs."

-Josh Billings

 

 

"Happy were men if they understood. There is no safety but in doing good."

-John Founlan

 

 

"The pursuit of happiness....is the greatest feat man has to accomplish."

-Robert Henri

 

"Everyone, without exception, is searching for happiness."

-Blaise Pascal

 

 

"It takes a highly intellectual individual to enjoy leisure.....Most of us had better count on working. What a man really wants is creative challenge with sufficient skills to bring him within the reach of success so that he may have the expanding joy of achievement.....Few people overwork; plenty overeat, overworry, overdrink.....Few realize real joy and happiness of conquest. The basis of mental health for the average adult is more work, provided the work is not mere drudgery."

-Dr. Fay B. Nash

 

"For a man is scarcely happy if he is very ugly to look at, or of low birth, or solitary and childless, and presumably less so if he has children or friends who are quite worthless, or if he had good ones who are now dead."

-Aristotle

 

"The great and crowning of all good,

Life's final star, is Brotherhood."

-Edwin Markham

 

"Men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself: "I am doing God's will on earth."

-Anton Chekhov

 

"Man is the artificer of his own happiness."

-Thoreau

 

"Happy the man who has learned the cause of things and has put under his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed."

-Virgil

 

"Suspicion is no less an enemy to virtue than to happiness. he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt."

-Johnson

 

"The more one is hated, I find the happier one is."

-Louis Ferdinand Celine

 

 

"I was never happy until I had given up all hope."

-Rousseau

 

 

"Happiness hates the timid!"

-Eugene O'Neill

 

 

"If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

-Robertson Davies

 

 

"The cure for unhappiness is happiness-I don't care what anyone says."

-Elizabeth McCracken

 

 

"Those only are happy, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness."

-John Stuart Mill

 

"Look around and see if you can find a single genuinely happy person-fearless, free from insecurities, anxieties, tensions, worries. You would be lucky if you found one in a hundred thousand. This should lead you to be suspicious of the programming and the beliefs that you and they hold in common. But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion. And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs. What makes it even worse is the fact that people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are-like the man in a dream who has no idea he is dreaming."

-Anthony De Mello S.J.

The Way to Love: the last meditations of

 

"Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs....All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do....

   Contentment and indeed usefulness comes as the infallible result of great acceptances, great humilities-of not trying to make ourselves this or that (to conform to some dramatized version of ourselves), but of surrendering ourselves to the fullness of life-of letting life flow through us."

-David Grayson

 

 

"For happiness, how little suffices for happiness!....the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a wisk, an eye glance-little maketh up the best happiness. Be still."

-Nietzsche

 

"Above all, try something."

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

 

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

"Act-in the living present!"

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

"To believe that if only we had this or that we would be happy, or to pursue any excessive desire, diverts us from seeing that happiness depends on an adequate self."

-Eric Hoffer

 

"Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit."

-Hosea Ballou

 

"The sage....does not value goods which are hard to come by."

-Lao Tzu

 

"Slumber not in the tents of your fathers. The world is advancing. Advance with it."

-Giuseppe Mazzini

 

"Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people."

-Schopenhauer

 

"There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning."

-Christopher Morley

 

"Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious ephemeral and subject to chance."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed."

-Bertrand Russell

 

"I am of the opinion that inner happiness is impossible without idleness."

-Chekhov

 

"Work and love-these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis."

-Theodor Reik

 

"Those who seek happiness miss it, and those who discuss it, lack it."

-Holbrook Jackson

 

"If you pursue happiness you'll never find it."

-C.P. Snow

 

"Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is at their heels."

-Bertolt Brecht

 

"To Hear Always, to think always, to learn always, it is thus that we live truly; he who aspires to nothing, and learns nothing, is not worthy of living."

-Sir Arthur helps

 

"Work is life, you know, and without it, there's nothing but fear and insecurity."

-John Lennon

 

"It is by studying little things, that we attain to the art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible."

-Dr. Samuel Johnson

 

"Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else."

-Andre Gide

 

"That which makes people dissatisfied with their condition, is the chimerical ideas they form of the happiness of others."

-James Thomson

 

 

"The great and glorious masterpiece of man is how to live with a purpose."

-Michel de Montaigne

 

 

"This is true joy of life-the being used for a purpose that is recognized by yourself as a right one, instead of being a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

-G.B. Shaw

 

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."

-John Stuart Mill

 

 

"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."

-Blaise Pascal

 

 

"If all of that consisted in doings, in actions, in words, I would be able to describe and render it to some extent; but how can I say what was never said, or done, or even thought, but tasted and felt, so that I can name no object for my happiness except the feeling itself? I got up with the sun and was happy, I took a walk and I was happy, I saw Maman and was happy, I left her and was happy. I roamed the woods and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I was idle, I worked in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped around the house, and happiness followed me everywhere. It wasn't in any single thing one could identify, it was entirely in myself, and it couldn't leave me for a moment."

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 

"Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting happiness. Even in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single moment of which the heart could truthfully say: "Would that this moment could last forever!" And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come?"

-Rousseau

 

"Cary Grant once warned the then-young director Peter Bogdanovich, who was at the time living with Cybill Shepherd, to stop telling people he was in love. "And above all," Grant warned, "stop telling them you're happy" When Bogdanovich asked why, Cary Grant answered, "Because they're not in love and they're not happy..."

New York Times Oct 23,2005

 

"For me, happiness came from prayer to a kindly God, faith in a kindly God, love for my fellow man, and doing the very best I could every day of my life. I had looked for happiness in fast living, but it was not there. I tried to find it in money, but it was not there, either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be fundamental truths of life, when I began to develop my limited ability, to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts, and fill it with zeal and courage and love, when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly I began to feel the stimulating, warm glow of happiness, and life for me began to flow like a stream between smooth banks."

-Young

 

 

"Where the fear is, happiness is not."

-Seneca

 

 

"Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

 

 

"I have always been impressed by the fact that the most studiously avoided subject in Western Philosophy is that of happiness."

Lin Yutang

 

 

"The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things."

-Ernest Dimnet (1866-1954)

 

 

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

-Bertrand Russell

 

 

"The right to happiness is fundamental: /Men live so little time and die alone."

-Bertolt Brecht

 

 

"Happiness is a very common plant, a native of every soil, yet, some skill is required in gathering it; for many poisonous weeds look like it, and deceive the unwary to their ruin."

-Daniel Orcutt (Shaker)

 

 

"I used to think it was great to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal, careless, disdainful of it. But now I see that there is nothing so great as to be capable of happiness."

-Anne Gilchrist

 

 

"A multitude of small delights constitute happiness."

-Charles Baudelaire

 

 

"The little things are infinitely the most important."

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

 

"The world looks.....as if it is being devoured by some grievous species-partly because of narrow economic assumptions that govern the behavior of corporations and nations.....A clearer understanding of what makes humans happy-not merely more eager consumers or more productive workers-might begin to reshape those assumptions (to better) the lives we lead and the world we live in."

New York Times editorial

 

"There's an awful lot of talk these days implying that it is abnormal to be unhappy.....that if you're unhappy you ought to go see a doctor.....There's a whole new profession of people who advise other people on how to live a life....This has been greatly overdone. There's a lot of genuine mental illness....But it worries me that people, especially the young, are being brought up to believe that if they're unhappy, they ought to go see a counselor and get what's called guidance."

-Lewis Thomas former director of research for Sloan-Kettering

 

 

"In what constitutes the real happiness of human life (the poor) are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for."

-Adam Smith

 

 

"If you want to be happy, be."

-Leo Tolstoy

 

"Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it."

-Dostoyevsky

 

"You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy."

-Jean Anoulih

 

 

"To be happy you must forget yourself. Learn benevolence; it is the only cure of a morbid temper."

-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

 

 

"It is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."

Edmund Spenser

 

 

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

-Marcus Aurelius

 

 

"Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness."

-Andre Gide

 

 

"Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

"Anything you're good at contributes to happiness."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"Happy is he who gets to know the reason for things."

Virgil

 

 

"Here lies a paradox: an individual who becomes richer becomes happier; but when society as a whole grows richer, nobody seems any more content."

The Economist Aug 9th 2003

 

 

"Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them."

-Leo Tolstoy

 

 

"Make up your mind to enjoy the voyage. Sooner or later, your mind will agree that its a great idea. It is your moral duty to be happy."

Vernon Howard

 

 

"Justice is the only worship

Love is the only priest

Ignorance is the only slavery

Happiness is the only good.

The time to be happy is now,

the place to be happy is here,

The way to be happy is to make others so."

Robert Ingersoll

The Experts Speak

 

"The man who has become emancipated from the empire of worry will find life is a much more cheerful affair than it used to be while he was perpetually being irritated."

Bertrand Russell

 

"Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life, and consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work."

Bertrand Russell

 

"Think of happiness as a state of inner liberty. That is exactly what it is. It is never anything else. It will help if you forget the word happiness altogether. Substitute the term inner liberty. It works favorably upon your thinking habits. It connects inner liberty with the genuine meaning of happiness. And that puts you on the right track."

Vernon Howard

 

"The happy nature is that which rejoices on every occasion, and which is not discontented with anything whatever which exists in the world, but is pleased with whatever happens, as being good, and beautiful, and expedient."

Philo of Alexandria

 

"A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one."

-H.L. Mencken

 

"The extremity of happiness is the assistance of God, for there can be no such thing as want when God gives his aid."

Philo of Alexandria

 

 

"If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy. So one must find out how to become happy oneself. Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes."

Ramana Maharshi 

 

"He who has such little knowledge of human value as to seek happiness by changing anything but his disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove."

-Samuel Johnson

 

"Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy cause."

-Helen Keller

 

"Character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse."

-Aristotle, The Poetics

 

"Human happiness is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur everyday."

Ben Franklin

 

"Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness."

Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

"It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly."

Emerson

 

"To work very hard like dogs and hogs for sense gratification is not the proper ambition of human life; human life is meant for a little austerity. We have to purify our existence; that is the mission of human life. Why should we purify our existence? Because then we will get spiritual realization, the unlimited, endless pleasure and happiness. That is real pleasure, real happiness."

-A.C. Bbaktivedanta Swami

 

 

"Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."

-Maurice Proust

 

 

…I will be a man among men; and no longer a dreamer among shadows. Henceforth be mine a life of actions and reality! I will work in my sphere, nor wish it other than it is. This alone is health and happiness."

Henry W. Longfellow

 

 

"If a man is happy in America it is considered he is doing something wrong."

Clarence Darrow

 

"Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you, it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap."

William Bennett

Quoted from The Soul: An Archeology by Claudia Setzer

 

 

"Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

 

"What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reasons and virtue."

Freidrich Nietzsche

 

 

"In a disordered imagination lies the source of human unhappiness. It makes us wander across the seas from one fantasy to another, and if its spell leaves us in the end; it is by then too late; the hour strikes and the man dies detesting life."

Napoleon

 

"The extremity of happiness is to rest unchangeably and immovably on God alone."

Philo of Alexander

 

"There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere."

J. Krishnamurti

 

"Mankind is interdependent, and the happiness of each depends upon the happiness of all, and it this lesson that humanity has to learn today as the first and the last lesson."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

"All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all."

Balzac

 

 

"Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom, we are tempted by our passions and restrained by conscience. What more could divine power itself have done in our behalf?"

Jean Jacques Rousseau

 

 

"It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how and still be happy, be in the being and the knowing well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss."

Henry Miller

 

 

"Happiness lies in the fulfillment of the spirit through the body."

Cyril Connoly

 

 

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

Ernest Hemingway

 

 

"The unhappiness of man today is very widespread. It is not limited to New York. It is the unhappiness of our century: Moscow, Paris, Prague, London, Rome, and unhappiness against which the best of our youth protest."

Piero Scanziani

The Enrtronauts

 

 

"All right, forget all the rest if you must, but remember this: to live a life that is purely personal, purely selfish, is the beginning of all unhappiness-not right away, but in time."

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

 

"Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live."

-Marcus Aurelius

 

"What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it-so impalpable-a mere breath, an evanescent tinge?"

Walt Whitman

 

"Why is it, Maeccenas, that no one is ever quite happy with the life he has chosen or stumbled upon, but loves to praise those who do something else? ….So it is that you rarely find a man who admits to having been happy with the time allotted him and is ready to depart like an unsatisfied guest."

Horace

 

"There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life."

William Lyon Phelps

 

"All those who are not happy in this world are criminals who have violated natures' law."

Epictetus

 

"The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether your are happy or not."

G.B. Shaw

 

 

"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him."

Victor Frankl

 

 

"Character determines men’s qualities, but is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse."

Aristotle

 

"One is Happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness-simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all a clear conscience. happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain. by the proper use of experience and thought one can draw much from oneself, by determination and patience one can even restore one's health-so let us live life as it is, and not be ungrateful."

-George Sand

 

:"He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition."

Samuel Johnson

 

 

"Depression is the inability to construct a future."

Rollo May

 

Altering the Past, Present and Future by Stephen Rosen   from Future Facts

"How would you react if you could no longer conceive of the future-but live only in the present and past? It sounds like a philosopher's puzzle or a science fiction nightmare. But with the use of posthypnotic suggestion, Dr. Bernard Aaronson has explored this and other drastic alterations in our perceptions of space and time.

   In experiments conducted at the bureau of Research in Neurology and Psychiatry, Princeton, New Jersey. Dr. Bernard Aaronson and others gave this posthypnotic instruction to six volunteers: "Do you know how we divide time into the three categories of past, present and future? When I wake you, the future will be gone. There will be no future."

   The researchers didn't know what to expect when one region of time was suddenly erased or abated. The results were extraordinary. In some cases the subjects experienced behavior changes  that one would anticipate only with the use of powerful psychoactive drugs. One subject "found himself in a boundless, immanent present." He became fascinated with colors and textures, and went so far as to describe his feelings as "mystical." Ordinarily goals and deadlines are located in the psychological future; these plans, in turn, produce hopes and anxieties. But without a conception of tomorrow, the subjects generally lost all their motivation and all their anxieties.

   Later, when the subjects were asked to experience "an expanded future," the effects were different but equally remarkable. The subjects felt they had been given all the time they needed to accomplish everything they ever intended. They were calm and happy, and any apparent fear of death vanished.

   In other tests, Dr. Aaronson hypnotically expanded or eradicated his subjects' past and present. Eliminating the present was by far the most disturbing: subjects felt profoundly depressed and behaved almost schizophrenically. One volunteer described the sensation of "unbeing," a lonely, deathlike detachment. Eliminating the past also had a negative impact, characterized by drowsiness and impaired functioning, several people suffered memory losses and had difficulty speaking. Everything seemed meaningless.

   In contrast, expanding the past and present produced good feelings. Widening the world of the present encouraged exuberance and enhanced both visual and auditory sensations. .....

Stephen Rosen

Future facts

 

"We ought to be "unhappy", and are, because we are inhuman, not fulfilling therefore our "design", our destiny."

Frank LLoyd Wright

 

 

"Despair is the price one pays for selling oneself an impossible aim."

Graham Greene

 

 

"Happy people are ignoramuses and glory in nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning."

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841)

 

 

"The formula for complete happiness is to be very busy with the unimportant."

Edward A. Newton

 

 

"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth."

George Bernard Shaw

 

 

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."

George Orwell

 

 

"There is something curiously boring about someone else’s happiness."

Aldous Huxley

 

"We are never as unhappy as we think, nor as happy as we had hoped."

-Francois de La Rochefouculd

 

 

"The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"The world of the happy is quite different from that of the unhappy."

Ludwig Witgenstein (1889-1951)

 

 

"A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live."

Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

 

 

"Every man has a rainy corner of his life whence comes foul weather which follows him."

Jean Paul Richter

 

 

"The more refined one is, the more unhappy.’

Chekhov

 

 

"The only joy in the world is to begin."

Cesare Pavese

 

 

"Will you seek afar off? You will come back at last to things best known to you, finding happiness, knowledge, not in another place but in this place….not in another hour, but this hour."

Walt Whitman

 

 

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about."

Charles Kingsley

 

 

"Do you want life to be interesting? Refuse what bores you and seek what quickens your spirit."

David Seaburg

 

 

 

"Take a walk, despite the colloquialism, is less an injunction to get out of here than a prescription for getting the most out of life. The more you walk, the better you feel, the more relaxed you become, the more you sense, the better you think, the less mental clutter you accumulate. And it’s the uncluttered man who is the happy man."

Aaron Susman & Ruth Goode

The Magic of Walking

 

 

"Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religious of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook."

C.G. Jung

 

 

"Blessed is the man who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness."

Thomas Carlyle

 

 

"It is not a good sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."

              J. Krishnamurti

 

 

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

Robertson Davies

The Table Task of Robertson Davies

 

 

"Any ordinary man can….surround himself with two thousand books….and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy."

Augustine Birrell

 

 

"Happiness remains to be defined, which it never has been, except by Voltaire who called it a myth invented by Satan for man’s despair. Utopia is perhaps as mythical and general happiness a chimera. General contentment seems less illusory. Its main factor, perhaps, is non-interference and that may come when man shall have learned that nothing is important."

Edgar Saltus

 

 

"I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."

Albert Schweitzer

 

 

"It’s a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."

W. Somerset Maugham

 

 

"it is the mind that maketh good or ill, that maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor."

Edmund Spenser

 

 

"Simple pleasures….are the last refuge of the complex."

Oscar wilde

 

 

"The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible-you must feel it right here ( hitting his breast) and then you can start being happy again."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness."

Jules Renard

 

 

 

"I am happy in having learned to distinguish between ownership and possession. Books, pictures, and all the beauty of the world belong to those who love and understand them. All of these things that I am entitled to, I have-I own them by divine right. So I care not a bit who possesses them. I used to care very much and consequently was very unhappy."

James Howard Keller

 

"The fact is that nowhere, these days, is anyone genuinely happy, and that of the countless faces assumed by the Ideal-or, if you dislike the word, the concept of something better-travel is one of the most engaging and most deceitful. All is rotten in public affairs: those who deny this truth feel it even more deeply and bitterly than those who assert it. Nevertheless, divine Hope still pursues her way, assuaging our tormented hearts with the constant whisper "There is something better-namely, your ideal."

George Sand

Winter in Majorca

 

"Real Happiness is not dependent on external things. The pond is fed from within. The kind of happiness that stays with you is the happiness that springs from inward thoughts and emotions. You must cultivate your mind if you wish to achieve enduring happiness. You must furnish your mind with interesting thoughts and ideas. For an empty mind seeks pleasure as a substitute for happiness."

-Lillian Eichler Watson paraphrasing William Lyons Phelps

 

"Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is."

-Elbert Hubbard

 

"Happiness is giving up all hope of a better past"

anon

 

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation."

Sigmund Freud

 

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness."

Eric Hoffer (1902-83)

The Passionate State of Mind

 

"The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being."

David Hume (1711-76)

 

 

"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."

George Santayana

The Life of Reason

 

"There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness…..is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase "the pursuit of happiness" is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world."

Malcolm Muggeridge

 

"Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it….Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object; it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an in tenser quality of life."

George Bernard Shaw

 

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."

Epictetus

 

"Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift."

Tom Stoppard

 

"If you cannot be happy in one way, be in another, and this felicity of disposition wants but little aid from philosophy, for health and good humor are almost the whole affair. Many run about after felicity, like an absent man hunting for his hat, while it is in his hand or on his head."

James Sharp

 

"Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness."

Baltasar Gracian

 

"Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown. But joy is a positive thing; in Joy…..something goes out from oneself to the universe a warm, possessive effluence of love. There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make happiness."

Lord Tweedsmuir

 

"If you look to others for fulfillment,

you will never be truly fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on money,

you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

When you realize there is nothing lacking,

the whole world belongs to you."

Tao Te Ching

 

 

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction of being loved for yourself, or, more correctly, being loved in spite of yourself."

Victor Hugo

 

"It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with true greatness, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.

George Eliot

 

"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

"The Truth that brings happiness cannot be preached; it can only be achieved by individuals who honestly look within themselves."

Leo Tolstoy

 

"Happiness is not good for work."

Charles Darwin

 

"It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

"One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness-simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I feel certain,"

George Sand

 

"Our happiness depends on wisdom all the way."

-Sophocles

 

"Be happy. It's one way of being wise."

-Colette

 

"But life has taught me that it knows better plans that we can imagine, so that I try to submerge my own desires, apt to be too insistent, into a calm willingness to accept what comes, and to make the most of it, then wait again. I have discovered that there is a Pattern, larger and more beautiful than our short vision can weave."

Julia Seton

 

"Nothing on earth renders happiness less approachable than trying to find it. Historian Will Durant described how he looked for happiness in knowledge, and found only disillusionment. He then sought happiness in travel and found weariness; in wealth and found discord and worry, He looked for happiness in his writing and was only fatigued. One day he saw a woman waiting in a tiny car with a sleeping child in her arms, A man descended from a train and came over and gently kissed the woman and then the baby, very softly so as not to awaken him, The family drove off and left Durant with a stunning realization of the real nature of happiness, He relaxed and discovered that "every normal function of life holds delight."

The One Sure Way to Happiness ,-

by June Callwood ,Oct 7 Readers Digest

 

 

"Simplify ,Simplify, Simplify . "

Thoreau

 

"A reasonable man needs only practice moderation to find happiness."

-Johann von Goethe

 

"To forget oneself is to be happy."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

 

"No man can be merry unless he is serious."

-G.K. Chesterton

 

"My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?"

-Charles M. Schulz

 

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness."

-William Saroyan

 

"Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."

-John Stuart Mill

 

"It is comparison that makes men happy or miserable."

-anon

 

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty

good time."

Edith Wharton

 

"When one has a famishing thirst for happiness, one is apt to gulp down diversions whenever they are offered. The necessity of draining the dregs of life before the wine is savored does not cultivate a discriminating taste."

Alice Caldwell Rice

Calvary Alley 1918

 

"Nature has not changed. The night is still unsullied, the stars still twinkle, and the wild thyme smells as sweetly now as it did then. We may be afflicted and unhappy, but no one can take from us the sweet delight which is natures gift to those who love her and her poetry."

George Sand

 

 

"To fill the hour,-that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them."

Emerson

 

The world and time are the

dance of the lord in emptiness

the silence of the spheres is

the music of a wedding feast

no despair of ours can alter

the reality of things or

stain the joy of the cosmic

dance which is always there

Indeed we are in the midst of it 

and it is in the midst of us

it beats in our very blood

whether we want it or not

Yet we are invited to forget

ourselves on purpose-cast

our awful solemnity to the wind

and join the eternal dance.

Thomas Merton

 

"A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. he or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty- seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Livableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily abused; and Within practical limits it is one of the most in- contestable truths in the whole body of Morality."

Robert Louis Stevenson

HAPPINESS

 

"Complaining should happen infrequently; criticism and gossip, never. If we are honest with ourselves, life events that lead us to legitimately complain are exceedingly rare....To be a happy person who has mastered your thoughts and has begun creating your life by design, you need a very high threshold of what leads you to express grief, pain, and discontent."

-Rverend Will Bowen A Complaint Free World

 

 

"The wise man does not burn with ambition or lust for fame, he does not envy the good fortune of his enemies, nor even of his friends; he avoids the fevered competition of the city and the turmoil of political strife; he seeks the calm of the countryside, and finds the sweet and deepest happiness in tranquility of body and mind. Because he controls his appetites, lives without pretense, and puts aside all fears, the natural "sweetness of life" (hedone) rewards him with the greatest of all goods, which is peace."

Epicurius

 

"To accustom ourselves to plain living and simple ways is an

almost certain road to health."

Epicurius

 

 

"There are men who are happy without knowing it."

-Vauvenargues

 

"Desires may be ignored when our failure to accomplish them will not really cause us pain."

Epicuius

 

"In the end, then , understanding is not only the highest virtue, it is also the highest happiness, for it avails more than any other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only liberator. it frees us from bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread of death; it teaches us how to bear misfortune, and how to derive a deep and lasting pleasure from the simple good of life and the quiet pleasure of the mind, death is not so frightful when we view it intelligently; the suffering it involves may be briefer and slighter than that which we have borne time and again during our lives; it is our foolish fancies of what death may bring that lend to it so much of its terror. And consider how little is needed to a wise content-Fresh air, the cheapest foods, a modest shelter, a bed, a few books, and a friend."

Will Durant

:The Life of Greece

 

"It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly; nor to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly."

Epicurius

 

 

"Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory."

-Norman Vincent Peale

 

"When, therefore, we say that pleasure is the chief good we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those that lie in sensual enjoyment-but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from disturbance. For it is not continued drinking’s and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or feasts of fish or other expensive foods, that make life pleasant, but such sober contemplation as examines the reasons for choice and avoidance, and puts to flight the vain opinions from which arises most of the confusion that troubles the soul."

Epicurius

 

"Guest, thou shalt be happy here, for here happiness is esteemed the highest good,"

(carved over the garden entrance to Epicures' school)

 

"There are two ways of being happy: We may either diminish our wants or augment our means-either will do-the result is the same."

Ben Franklin

 

"A great deal of the joy of life consists in doing perfectly, or at least to the best of one's ability, everything which he attempts to do. There is a sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work-a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in all its parts-which the superficial man, who leaves his work in a slovenly, ship- shod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns work into art. The smallest thing well done, becomes artistic."

William Mathews

 

"All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble,. They can never be solved, but only outgrown."

C. G. Jung

C.G. Jung Psychological Reflections

A New Anthology of his Writing

Jolande Jocobi (N.Y. 1978)p-304

 

"Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing?

dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change,"

-D.H. Lawrence

 

" What then, in the last resort, is the source of this opposition; the true reason of your uneasiness, your unrest'? The reason lies, not in any real incompatibility between the interests of the temporal and the eternal orders; which are but "two aspects of One Fact, two expressions of one Love. It lies solely in yourself; in your attitude towards the world of things. You are enslaved by the verb "to have": all your reactions to life consist in corporate or individual demands, appetites, wants. 'that "love or hate" of which we sometimes speak is mostly cupboard-love. We are quick to snap at her ankles when she locks the larder door: a proceeding which we dignify by the name of pessimism. The mystic knows not this attitude of demand. He tells us again and again, that "he is rid of all his asking"; that "henceforth the heat of having shall never scorch him more." Compare that with your normal attitude to the world, practical man your quiet certitude that you are well within your rights in pushing the claims of "the I, the Me, the Mine"; your habit, if you be religious, of asking for the weather and the government that you want, of persuading the Supernal powers to take a special interest in your national or personal health and prosperity. How often in each day do you deliberately revert to an attitude of disinterested adoration? Yet this is the only attitude in which true communion with the universe is possible. The very mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet you have not wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friendship, comfort, amusement. you feel that you have a right to some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a certain immunity from failure or humiliation. You resent anything which opposes you in these matters. You become restless when you see other selves more skilful in the game of acquisition than yourself, You hold tight against all comers your own share of the spoils. You are rather inclined to shirk boring responsibilities and unattractive, unrenumerative toil; are greedy of pleasure and excitement, devoted to the art of having a good time. If you possess a social sense, you demand these things not only for yourself but for your tribe-the domestic or racial group to which you belong. 'these dispositions, so ordinary that they almost pass unnoticed, were named by our blunt forefathers the seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Anger, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust. Perhaps you would rather call them-as indeed they are-the seven common forms of egotism. They represent the natural reactions to life of the self-centered human consciousness, enslaved by the "world of multiplicity"; and constitute absolute barriers to its attainment of Reality. So long as these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel things as "they are; but only as they affect ourselves, our family, our party, our business, our church, our empire-the I, the Me, the Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detached and purified heart can view all things-the irrational cruelty of circumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life, the acts and beliefs of enemy and friend-in true proportion; and reckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore the mystics tell us perpetually that "selfhood must be killed" before Reality can be attained."

Evelyn Underhill

Practical Mysticism

 

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that....Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."

-Samuel Beckett

Endgame

 

 

"Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact."

-Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

"When the I, the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done"

Kabir

 

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness."

Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

 

"The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach."

Havelock Ellis

 

 

Justice is the only worship

Love is the only priest

Ignorance is the only slavery

Happiness is the only good.

The time to be happy is now,

The place to be happy is here,

The way to be happy is to make others so."

 

Robert Green Ingersoll

The experts speak

 

 

"We are never living, but only hoping to live; and looking forward always to being happy, it is inevitable that we never are so."

Pascal

 

"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

"Men seek retreats for themselves: houses in the country, seashores and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself."

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

 

 

"It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is."

Erasmus (1465-1536)

 

 

"consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work."

Bertrand Russell

 

"The man who has become emancipated from the empire of worry will find life is a much more cheerful affair than it used to be while he was perpetually being irritated."

Bertrand Russell

 

"The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is a fatal one."

-Bertrand Russell

 

"Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an indispensable condition of secure and lasting happiness."

Bertrand Russell

 

"I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: "Weary of earth and laden with my sin'.....In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.....very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself-no doubt justly-a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection."

Bertrand Russell

The Conquest of Happiness

 

 

"No man is a failure who is enjoying life."

William Feather

 

"It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business."

Dolly Madison

 

"The behavior (of our genes) is designed to interfere with the happiness of others. If genes were capable of having emotions, (they) would say things like: "Happiness is making others unhappy".....(Their) strengths depend upon billions of years of selection for selfishness."

Lyall Watson

 

"Everything Jungians believe about the shadow-that it is dangerous, disorderly, fugitive, distasteful, sensual stupid and lacking in spirituality-is true also of the genes. Every time we laugh when someone slips on a banana peel, it is the shadow showing. Every time we take pleasure in the pain of a rival, it is a genetic pleasure. Each time we become impulsive, display exaggerated feelings about others, feel humiliated, find excessive fault, display unreasonable anger, or behave "as if we are not ourselves," we are seeing the genetic shadow in action."

Lyall Watson

 

"There is something self-defeating in the too-conscious pursuit of pleasure."

Max Eastman

 

 

"Get pleasure out of life…..as much as you can. No one ever died of pleasure."

Sol Hurok

 

 

"What is it then that makes people happy?

Free and full life and the consciousness of life. Or, if you will, the pleasurable exercise of our energies and the enjoyment of the rest which that exercise or expenditure of energy makes necessary to us. I think that is happiness for all, and covers all the difference of capacity from the most energetic to the laziest. Now whatever interferes with that freedom and fullness of life, under whatever species guise it may come, is an evil; is something to be got rid of as speedily as possible. It ought not to be endured by reasonable men (and women), who naturally wish to be happy."

William Morris

The Society of the Future

 

"In the Thai language there is a word, sanuk, which means that whatever you do, you should enjoy it. Without joy or happiness, nothing is worth doing. Sulak Sivaraksa, a Buddhist monk and a leading proponent of what is called "engaged Buddhism," explains, "Sanuk means that you enjoy your work with mindfulness and awareness, with respect for others and for nature. Sanuk also means that you contribute to the welfare of others. So with all your enjoyment, you must also have dana-giving, charity. That is essential. If people would practice enjoying themselves with respect for others, that would be a harmonious way of living."

Michael Toms and Justine Willis Toms

True Work: Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do

 

 

"….so far as people can be happy on this earth….Happiness does not necessarily depend on social structures or system of government, as our contemporaries seem to think. To me it seems to be primarily a question of equilibrium between the world by which man is surrounded and the world which he carries in his heart. We live in an age of terrifying disequilibrium's, and should be equally unhappy under Kings, presidents, popes, or tribunes of the people, whether organized in republics or empires, soviets or theocracies…"

Fosco Maraini

Secret Tibet

 

Don’t evaluate your life in terms of achievements, trivial or monumental, along the way. If you do, you will be destined to the frustration of always seeking out other destinations, and never allowing yourself actually to be fulfilled…..Instead, wake up and appreciate everything you encounter along your path. Enjoy the flowers that are there for your pleasure. Tune in to the sunrise, the little children, the laughter, the rain and the birds. Drink it all in….There is no way to happiness; happiness IS the way."

Dr. Wayne Dyer

 

 

"We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once."

Alexander Smith (1830-67)

On Death and the fear of Dying

 

 

 

"Let no man be called happy before his death. Till then, he is not happy, only lucky."

Solon (640-558 B.C.)

 

 

"Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague."

Norman Douglas (1868-1952)

 

"Generosity brings happiness at every stage of its expression.

We experience joy in forming the intention to be generous.

We experience joy in the actual act of giving something. And we

experience joy in remembering the fact that we have given."

-The Buddha

 

 

"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil-or else an absolute ignorance."

Graham Greene

The Heart of the Matter

 

 

 

"To be happy, one must rid oneself of prejudice, be virtuous, healthy, have a capacity for enjoyment and for passion and the ability to lend oneself to illusion….Like passion, illusion is not something you can have if it is not in your nature, however, you can avoid looking behind the scenes."

Madame Du Chatelet

 

 

"It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed."

Kin Hubbard

 

 

"In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

"Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product."

Eleanor Roosevelt

 

 

"The greatest happiness is to be that which one is."

Theodore Herzl

 

 

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

"A happy man is an addition to society, an unhappy man is a great danger."

-Otto Rank

Will to Happiness

 

"Are three-quarters of humanity happier due to the progress of science and its alliance with industry?....Theosophical missionaries aim also at a social revolution. But it is a wholly ethical revolution. it will come about when the disinherited masses understand that happiness is in their own hands, that wealth brings nothing but worries, that he is happy who works for others, for those others work for him, and when the rich realize that their felicity depends upon that of their brothers-whatever their race or religion-then only will the world see the dawn of happiness."

-H.P. Blavatsky

 

"Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign governments of people's own choosing. The haunting spirit is manifold; a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among the young), increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better........a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends."

-Robert Lane

The Loss of happiness in Market Democracies

 

 

"It is indeed remarkable, that suffering and hardships do not, as a rule, abate love of life; they seem on the contrary to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repetition. Need and struggle are what excites us; one hour of triumph is what brings a void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come."

-William James

 

"I categorically affirm that the happiness and self-consciousness, which should be in real man, as well as in a peaceful communal existence between people (leaving aside and not attempting to analyze here the numerous other causes which exist in our lives through no fault of our own), depend in most cases exclusively on the absence in us of the feeling of "Vanity."

-Gurdjieff

 

There is one thing in the world that satisfies, and that is a meeting with the Guest."

-Kabir

 

"One should identify with the universe itself."

-Simon Weil

 

"The purpose of life is to seek happiness and the very motion of our life is toward happiness."

The Dalai Lama

 

"if you cannot make your own child happy, how do you expect to be able to make anyone else happy? If all our friends in the peace movement or of service communities of any kind do not love and help one another, whom can we love and help? Are we working for other humans, or are we just working for the name of an organization?"

-Thich Nhat Hanh

 

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness."

-Eric Hoffer

 

"We cannot find happiness in contemplating ourselves: but we can find it in contemplating infinity. Reaching out, with our imagination, toward its majesty, it will in turn embrace us and inspire us."

-Jacques Cousteau

 

"I have committed the worst sin that a person can commit; I have not been happy."

Thiago de Mello (Brazillian Poet)

 

 

"Free us from fear and all its children: shyness, rancor, jealousy, anger, hatred, revenge. It is discontent, the eldest daughter, who is growing ever stronger, making us more and more desolate. She drags us down and we grow accustomed o this out of inertia: it is easier to wallow in bitterness than to ascend to joy. And there is a certain form of pleasure in feeling that we are the victims of the universe."

Piero Scanziania

The Entronauts

 

"It is easy to obtain that which removes the pain caused by want and that which perfects the whole life, Therefore, (a wise person) has no need of things that involve struggle."

-Epicurus

 

"We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York. That would be dangerous."

-James H. Fowler  co-author of a study that found that happiness is contagious

 

"The unhappiness of man today is very widespread. It is not limited to New York. It is the unhappiness of our century: Moscow, Paris, Prague, London, Rome, and unhappiness against which the best of our youth protest…."

Piero Scanziania

 

"We regard self-sufficiency as a great good, not so that we may enjoy only a few things, but so that, if we do not have many, we may be satisfied with the few, being firmly persuaded that they take the greatest pleasure in luxury who regard it as least needed, and that everything that is natural is easily provided, while vain pleasures are hard to obtain....To be accustomed to simple and plain living is conducive to health and makes a man ready for the necessary tasks of life. It also makes us more ready for the enjoyment of luxury if at intervals we chance to meet with it, and it renders us fearless against fortune."

-Epicurus

 

   "I seem to remember Plato saying something like "Everything you desire you will have, unhappy wretch!" It's a sinister prediction. It means that all ambition is absurd and one is even more desperate after its fulfillment than before. We never truly perceive the vanity and emptiness of things till we have finally possessed them. There is, in ancient theology, an absolutely terrifying description of hell as being simply the fulfillment for eternity of all the desires which have governed men during their lives."

Jean Dutourd

The Horrors of Love

 

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."

-Tom Robbins

Jitterbug Perfume

 

"If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no man able to prevent this."

-Marcus Aurelius

 

"If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault....Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility except our own opinion."

-Epictetus   55 C.E.

 

"Fortify yourself with contentment, for it is an impregnable fortress."

-Epictetus

 

 

   "A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. He that has these two has little more to wish for, and he that wants either of them will be but little the better for anything else. Men's happiness or misery is most part of their own making. He whose mind directs not wisely will never take the right away, and he whose body is crazy and feeble will never be able to advance in it. I confess there are some men's constitutions of body and mind so vigorous and well framed by nature that they need not much assistance from others, but by the strength of their natural genius, they are from their cradles carried toward what is excellent; and by the privilege of their happy constitutions, are able to do wonders. But examples of this kind are but few, and I think I may say, that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind. The little or almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences. And there it is, as in the fountains of some rivers, where a gentle application of the hand turns the flexible waters into channels, that make them take quite contrary courses; and by this little direction, given them at first in the source, they receive different tendencies, and arrive at last at very remote and distant places."

John Locke

Some Thoughts Concerning Education

 

"I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to....In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized....would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No"....

   The experiences of this period had two very marked effects on my opinions and character. In the first place, they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But  I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end.  Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life( such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant , without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient....The only chance is to treat, not happiness , but some end external to it, as the purpose of life."

-J.S. Mill

 

"There is no mystery to happiness.

   Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn-or worse, indifference-cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. he lives in the present."

-Jed Rubenfeld

The Interpretation of Murder

 

"All Problems are illusions of the Mind."

-Eckhart Tolle

 

"Not because the world has been good to them are Taoist monks happy. They are happy because they have been good to the world. They, are philosophers who live moderate and virtuous lives, not for elaborate moral reasons but because it is easier and more pleasant to live well than it is to live any other way. anger, fear, worry-these emotions are uncomfortable, and the Taoist is dedicated to comfort.

   Why should he make himself miserable when it is just as easy to be happy? These aged priests do not sit on rocks with clenched teeth and high blood pressure trying to be good. They do not try to control their tempers. They are so well-tempered that temper is forgotten. They do not try to overcome selfishness. They have discovered the futility of the desire to possess. Nor are they going to develop dominant personalities; they have not the slightest interest in what other people think of them. With this complete detachment and impersonality the Taoist monks frequently live to extreme old age. Their realization has perfectly freed them from the irritations of physical existence that they are immune to most of the ailments which shorten the lives of Occidental People."

-Manly P. Hall

Self-Unfoldment

 

 

"If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

   Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists: the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic."

C.S. Lewis

God in the Dock

 

"Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa, once wrote that there are three occasions for true happiness in human beings. The first is a surplus of energy. The second is the cessation of pain. The third is the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God. The first is the province of youth. The second lasts only for a brief moment. The third is to be won by virtue and much work-inner work. If one has progressed past the duality of life, one has come to the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God. This is the joy that everyone of us knows to be our true heritage and that haunts us or inspires us as the goal of life."

Robert A. Johnson

Owning your Own Shadow

 

   "Throughout most of history thoughtful men have taken a rather grim view of man's life on earth. The Greeks went so far as to suggest that any considerable happiness, success or achievement in a man's life might well foretell disaster. Gilbert Murray wrote: "It is a bad look-out for anyone in Greek poetry when he is called a "happy man." And the good news of the gospel was by no means good news for life on this earth. "Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."

  
Then in the eighteenth century there emerged a spectacularly different view of man's condition. people came to believe that man's life on this earth need not be grim; on the contrary, it might be perfect if only man used his powers of reason to good effect.

   The rationalism, optimism and millennialism of the Enlightenment spread into every area of intellectual life like waves from a thrown rock. It was widely believed that man was treading an onward and upward path that would take him inevitably to the perfect society. A little more good will, rationality, science and material progress were all that were needed to speed him to Utopia.

   Though it is now easy to laugh at such naïveté, the good consequences were considerable. Much of the best that the western world has accomplished in education, in human welfare, in science and in the creation of civil institutions compatible with justice and decency was accomplished under the spell of those beliefs."

-John Gardner

Self-Renewal

 

 

   "I now saw too how my earlier discoveries could be applied to this problem of communication. For quite early in my enterprise I had found that to want results for myself, to do things with the expectancy of happiness, was generally fatal, it made the stream of delight dry up at the source. (Of course the greater part of every day was filled with jobs which had to be done in order that something else might happen; but I am not here dealing with necessities imposed from without, only with how to manage one's actions and attitudes where there is any freedom of choice.) So now I began to find that it was now way out, as I had once hoped it would be, to want results for other people. In my exasperated self-absorption I had envied those who were always doing things for others. But as I grew more observant I began to see that this by itself was no sure way to peace, for as long as you expect results from what you do there are here even more sources of exasperation. Once you assume your right to interfere in other people's problems they become in some ways more of a worry that your own, for with your own you can at least do what you think best, but other people always show such a persistent tendency to do the wrong thing. And then it was so fatally easy to think that I knew what was good for other people; it made me feel pleasantly superior to think myself in a position to help, and also it made me feel good, feel that I was piling up some subtle advantage for myself, becoming a more admirable character. It took me a long time to learn to resist the feeling that I ought to interfere and try to help people for their own good. I knew others did it and so felt I ought to, although I was never too clear about what were best to be done. And then in addition to the feeling of ought, there was also the sheer pain of another person's misery, which of course grew greater, not less, as I learned to be more perceiving.

    Gradually, however, I now came to understand that it was all right to do things for people as long as I did it for the sake of doing it, as a gesture of courtesy, the value being more in the act than in the result. If I sacrificed myself for others, it must be, not because I thought they really needed what I had to give (for this might be an insult, as if I were implicitly putting myself above them), but simply as a way of expressing my feelings towards them. Here the giving was enough in itself, it was not a means to an end."

Joanna Field

A Life  of One's Own

 

   "let's talk about that "inalienable right" that the Powers that Be don't want us talking about: The pursuit of happiness.

   This basic human right, proclaimed by the founders on July 4,1776, gets short shrift today. It's not taught in schools as a worthy goal in life, it's not mentioned by the mass media, it's not posed as a national objective by vote-seeking politicians, and it's deliberately discouraged by corporate bosses who constantly demand more hours from us with less pay. (As one T-shirt puts it: "Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do.")

   Instead, the prevailing culture insists that you derive your "happiness" from staying hitched to the constant plow of work, thus making some money so you can buy a car, watch TV, go to Disneyland. They've perverted the language, shifting the debate from real happiness to possessions-and that is leaving a very big hole in our lives."

Jim Hightower

 

   "Our generation is not the first to discover the chance and tragedy of this world, but if some of these writers had their way it might be the first generation to drown in self-pity at the thought. "Of all the infirmities we have," Montaigne said, "the most savage is to despise our being."

-john Gardner

Self-Renewal

 

Slough of Despond

"In Slough, though, I can't avoid the facts. The viral theory of happiness never took hold. The Slough 50 may have learned a thing or two about happiness, but the message never spread very far. Does that mean the viral theory is flawed? I don't think so. It's simply a matter of numbers. Plant enough happiness seeds-people like Richard Hill and Heather White and Veronica Puglia-and eventually the laws of exponential growth kick in. A tipping point is reached, and happiness, I believe, will spread like a California brush fire."

Eric Weiner

The Geography of Bliss

 

"No amount of partying and drinking, pleasure and travel, fame and fortune, success and creativity, indeed no amount of genuine human love and affection, can ever fully take our loneliness away. All of these things are good in themselves and can even help somewhat to alleviate our loneliness. but God has made us bigger than human love and affection. Only a total all-encompassing consummate union with all sincere persons, the world and with the divine life itself will finally put to rest our last lonely impulse."

-Ronald Rolheiser: The Restless Heart

 

"We do not have solitary beings. Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest."

-Lewis Thomas

 

"We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to beg differences that we often cannot foresee."

-Marian Wright Edelman

 

".....poetry of many kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable and music very great, delight. but now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music.....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.....The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

-from Autobiography of Charles Darwin

 

"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

-Albert Schweitzer

 

"Happiness makes people uneasy nowadays."

-David Hepworth

 

"happiness is the accumulation of Good."

-Buddha

 

  ".....The idea is that people who live nearby are more likely to be in contact and therefore more likely to pick up on each others' moods. geographic distance can be used as a proxy for likely frequency of social interaction. In our study, about one in three people live within a mile of their closest friend, but there is a lot of variation, and some friends live thousand of miles apart. We found that when a friend who lives less than a mile away becomes happy, it can increase the probability that you are happy by 25%. In contrast, the happiness of a friend who lives more than a mile away has no effect. Similarly, if your spouse lives with you and he or she becomes happy, then your probability of happiness goes up, but spouses who do not live together have no effect on each other. A happy sibling, who lives less than a mile away increases your chance of happiness by 14% , but more distant siblings have no significant effect. And happy next-door neighbors also increase your chance for happiness, while neighbors who live further away (even on the same block) have no significant effect.

   Happiness is thus not merely a function of individual experience or choice; it is also a property of groups of people. Changes in individual happiness can ripple through social connections and create large-scale patterns in the network, giving rise to clusters of happy and unhappy individuals. Although we cannot observe what caused happiness to spread, a variety of mechanisms are conceivable. happy people may share their good fortune (e.g., by being pragmatically helpful or financially generous to others), change their behavior towards others (e.g., by being nicer or less hostile), or merely exude an emotion that is genuinely contagious. Being surrounded by happy people might have beneficial biological effects, too. but whatever the mechanism, it seems clear that we need to change the way we think about happiness and our other emotions."

-Nicholas A. Christakis, MD. PhD. and James H. Fowler, PhD

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They shape Our Lives

 

 

"We all know people who are hedonists; they can never get enough of the good life. In fact, lasting happiness is difficult to achieve because people are on a "hedonic treadmill," although a change in a person's circumstances may cause them to be happier (e.g., finding a partner, winning the lottery) or sadder (e.g. losing a job, becoming paralyzed),  a wide body of research has shown that people tend to return to their previous level of happiness aft3er such events. In fact, studies of lottery winners and spinal cord injury patients reveal that, after a year or two, they are often no more happy or sad than the rest of us! Human beings adapt to their circumstances. So, a person trying to become happier is like someone walking up a downward-moving escalator. Although the effort to climb up and become happier is helpful, it is counteracted by the process of adaptation that forces one back to one's original state.

   Many people try to overcome this problem by engaging in intentional activities to improve their happiness. We might change our behavior by exercising regularly or trying to be kind to others or even avoiding having a long commute (which has been shown to be particularly deleterious to happiness). We might change our attitude by pausing to count our blessings or thinking about experiences in the most positive light (like Tibetan monks). We might also devote effort to causes we find meaningful or strive to achieve important personal goals. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that a sustained effort to engage in such happiness producing activities might help us to make progress up the downward-moving escalator.

   But in spite of these efforts, each of us tends to stay put in a particular long-term disposition; we appear to have a "set point" for personal happiness that is not easy to change. In fact, like other personality traits, personal happiness appears to be strongly influenced by our genes. Studies of identical and fraternal twins show that identical twins are significantly more likely to exhibit the same level of happiness than fraternal twins or regular siblings. Behavior geneticists have used these studies to estimate just how much genes matter, and their best guess is that long-term happiness depends 50% on a person's genetic set point, 10% on their circumstances (e.g., where they live, how rich they are, how healthy they are), and 40% on what they choose to think and do. What we experience in life can, of course, change our moods for a period of time, but in most cases these changes are transitory."

Nicholas A. Christakis, MD. PhD. and James H. fowler, PhD

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

 

 

 

"How ,then ,are we to arrive at just conclusions on a subject so important to the happiness of mankind? Surely, by that method which, in every experimental science to which it has been applied, has signally increased the power and knowledge of our species-by that method for  which our new philosophers would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy of the barbarous respondents and opponents of the Middle Ages-by the method of Induction-by observing the present state of t he world-by assiduously studying the history of past ages-by sifting the evidence of facts-by carefully combining and contrasting those which are authentic-by generalizing with judgment and diffidence-by perpetually brining the theory which we have constructed to  the test of new facts-by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove to be partially or fundamentally unsound. Proceeding thus-patiently, diligently, candidly-we may hope to form a system as far inferior in pretension to that  which we have been examining, and as far superior  to it in real utility, as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with-every sage of every malady with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the advertising quack which is to cure all human beings, in all  climates, of all diseases."

Lord Macaulay

The Miscellaneous Works of Lord Macaulay

 

"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation."

-Andre Gide

 

"At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. it's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one."

-Joseph Campbell

 

******************************

See Article: "The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness" Smithsonian Mag May 2004

Article: "Spending Money on Others Promotes happiness" by Elizabeth Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton  Science Magazine Vol 219 21 march 2008

Book: "The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life" by Richard Schoch

Book: "Going Sane: Maps of Happiness" by Adam Phillips

Book: "How We Choose To Be Happy" by Greg Hicks

Book: "The Spirit of Happiness" by T. Byram karasu  M.D.

Book: "The Art of Serenity" by T. Byram karasu M.D.

Book: "The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want" by Sonja Lyubomirsky

Book: "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation" by Sharon Salzberg

Book: "Pursuit of Happiness: Better living from Plato to Prozac" by Mark Kingwell

Book: "Happiness: A History" By Darrin McMahon

Book: "Stumbling On Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert

Book: "The Structure of Psychological Well Being" by Norman Bradburn

Book: "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science" by Richard Layard

Book: "The Art of Happiness" by the Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler

Book: "The Discovery of Happiness" Ed. by Stuart McCready

Book: "Montaigne & Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays" by M.A. Screech

Book: "What Happy People Know" by Dan Baker. Ph.D & Cameron Stauth

Book: "Happiness and Education" by Nel Noddings

Book: "The Geography of Bliss" by Eric Weiner

Book: "The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies" by Robert Lane

Book: "How To Be Happy, Dammit: A Cynic's Guide to Spiritual Happiness" by Karen Salmansohn

Book: "A Life of One's Own" by Joanna Field

Book: "The Discovery of Happiness" Ed. by Stuart McCready

Book: "The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need" by Peter J. Gomes

Book: "Virtue and Happiness: The Manual of Epictetus"

Book: "The Spirit of Happiness" by the Monks of New Skete

Book: "Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression" by Lewis Wolpert

Book: "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy" by Eric G. Wilson & Sarah Chrichton

Book: "The How of Happiness" by Sonja Lyubomirsky

Book: "The Happiness Trap" by Russ Harris

Book: "Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class" by Ronald W. Dworkin M.D. P.h.D

Book: "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like" by Paul Bloom.

 

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JOY

 

"   Are pleasure and joy the same thing? What is joy? Is it synonymous with happiness? Or is there something deeper and more meaningful to it than a soft drink on a hot day? The problem is that the word joy is as abused today as the words love and peace. Words that are better suited to describe inner-life realities are misapplied when used to refer to outward, visible realities only.

   Imagine the experiences of pleasure, happiness and joy on a scale. Pleasures are simpler and temporary, including creature comforts like eating, listening to music, or physical and sexual pleasure. happiness comes from a more elevated sense of well-being or security, often associated with personal achievement or recognition, joy begins to stretch into yet another realm beyond mere pleasure or happiness.

   Joy takes on a dimension of meaning that connects you to something bigger than yourself. Joy may include happiness and pleasure, but it can include suffering and sorrow as well. it transcends them. Leo Tolstoy wrote that "Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."

Cris Milliken

 

 

   "Many of us confuse happiness and joy. Happiness is often triggered by external events, events we usually have no control over-you get the promotion, he loves you back, they approve your mortgage application. happiness camouflages a lot of fears.

    but joy is the absence of fear. Joy is your soul's knowledge that if you don't get the promotion, keep the relationship, or buy the house, it's because you weren't meant to You're meant to have something better, something richer, something deeper, Something More. Joy is where your life began, with your first cry. Joy is your birthright."

-Sarah Ban Brethnach

Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self

 

 

"The Most profound joy has more of gravity than of levity in it."

-Michel de Montaigne

 

 

"The joy of a spirit is the measure of its power."

-Ninon de Lenclos

 

"Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself."

-Mahatma Gandhi

 

"Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls."

-Mother Teresa

 

"Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."

-William Shakespeare