Gretchen Rubin Moment of Happiness
“Now and then someone would accuse me of being evil — of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape record them. But I don’t think of myself as evil — just realistic. I learned when I was little that whenever I got aggressive I tried to tell someone what to do, nothing happened — I just couldn’t carry it off. I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up, because at least that way people still start to maybe doubt themselves. When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it.”
Andy Warhol, POPism
“Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again.”
Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years
“I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.”
Elias Canetti, The Human Province
“Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation.”
John Le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
“On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
“I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of Faults than I had imagined, but I had the Satisfaction of seeing them diminish.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.”
La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections
“But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere….But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man…to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path – bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements…”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg.”
“Pessimism like calumny is easy to do, and attracts immediate attention. The gossiper and the writer may find this out soon enough, and a little encouragement from the current mood will procure them successes that bring endless imitators in their trail. On the other hand saying good things about life in general and individuals in particular and making it interesting is a serious task which few can achieve with credit.”
Bernard Berenson, Sunset and Twilight
“It reminds us that our only but wholly adequate significance is as parts of the unimaginable whole. It suggests that even while we think that we are egotists we are living to ends outside ourselves.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!”
Eugene Delacroix, Journal
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
“The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”
Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.”
William Hazlitt, Characteristics
“Energy creates energy. It is by spending myself that I become rich.”
Sarah Bernhardt
“How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
“One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts, once one knows of 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.”
George Sand
“Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” The Essays of Montaigne
“When one loves, one does not calculate.”
St. Therese of Lisieux
