All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,
Whenever I start a new book, I think, 'This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.' Every time, I'm convinced. And th...
Although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.
Just because we're doesn't mean we're being productive. Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.
They say that people teach what they need to learn. By adopting the role of happiness teacher, if only for myself, I was trying to find the method to conquer my particular faults and limitations.
Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life---and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently g...
There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it's not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.
Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for busi...
'Potato-chip news' is news that's repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity gossip, sports gos...
One study showed that children who got a reward for coloring with magic markers—an activity that children love—didn’t spend as much time with markers, later, as children who didn’t expect a reward. Th...
Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird.
I had everything I could possibly want -- yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehe...
Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they're big, flashing signs that something needs to change.
The Levity Effect,
Life is too short to save your good china or your good lingerie or your good ANYTHING for later because truly, later may never come.
I’d asked myself, Why do habits make it possible for people to change? and now I knew the answer. Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal...
We need to have intimate, enduring bonds; we need to be able to confide; we need to feel that we belong; we need to be able to get support, and just as important for happiness, to give support. We nee...
Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backya...
Studies show that if you reward people for doing an activity, they often stop doing it for fun; being paid turns it into work.