“I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor
“Whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.”
Aristotle, Rhetoric
“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
Carl Jung, Schiller’s Ideas on the Type Problem, in Collected Work of C. G Jung
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, November 14, 1957”
“Habit simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue.”
William James, The Principles of Psychology
“Sight is often reinforced by the other senses. A rose looks different when you can smell it. A ballroom looks different when you can hear music. Whenever I saw the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, I would be apt to play the ‘Marseillaise’ in my mind, and the monument somehow seemed grander and more real.”
Henry Grunwald, Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight
“I have not been inordinately materialistic, but I am attached to my house, to my inherited belongings, and to the things that I have chosen for myself. All these objects add complexity to my emotional ties to the people with whom I have shared, and share, my life, and to my aspirations for myself.”
Ann Truitt, Turn: The Journal of an Artist
“Probably one can say that all beautiful, noble, or brilliant works are of use, or that everything that proves to be useful or beneficial has its own beauty.”
Isak Dineson, July 29, 1929
“There is another side of Kanchenjunga and of every mountain—the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards. That is the only side worth seeing.”
Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain: Journal volume 7
Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin and The Moment of Happiness Project
