I don't want to reject my life. I want to change my life without changing my life.
I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started—no longer.
He gave his assistant a stamped, addressed envelope with a check he’d written to an anti-charity, an organization whose policies he passionately opposes, with the instruction to mail the check if he h...
Boredom can be important. That’s when you have to figure out what you want to do.
Accept myself, and expect more of myself. Give myself limits to give myself freedom. Make people happier by acknowledging that they’re not feeling happy. Plan ahead to be spontaneous; only with carefu...
When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters.
Do once in a while.
This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.
The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.
The harder it is to do something, the harder it is to do it impulsively, so inconvenience helps us stick to good habits. There are six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient:· Increase the...
Maintaining a healthy weight requires us not to follow a temporary diet, but to change our eating habits forever.
I’ve been haunted for years by a public service poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, If this i...
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Make sure the things we do to make ourselves feel better don’t make us feel worse.
In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to...
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Hugging relieves stress, boosts feelings of closeness, and even squelches pain. In one study, people assigned to give five hugs each day for a month, aiming to hug as many different people as they cou...
Happy people make people happy, but I can’t make someone be happy, and No one else can make me happy.
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
Forbearance is a form of generosity.
Consistency, repetition, no decision—this was the way to develop the ease of a true habit.