The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Samuel Butler.

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

Twelve Personal Commandments

Four Splendid Truths

First: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
Second: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
Third: The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)
Fourth: You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." Mark Twain.
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“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
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Samuel Butler.

"One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education." --Samuel Butler

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Posted June 23, 2007

Comments

Hey, thought you would be interested in this article in the Globe and Mail about happiness and Bogota, Colombia

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070622.whappycover0623/BNStory/lifeMain/home

Posted by: starbucksweetie | June 23, 2007 at 10:02 AM

Thanks, I'm off to check out the link now!

Posted by: Gretchen Rubin | June 23, 2007 at 10:12 AM

Gretchen,

Doesn't the Declaration of Independence talk about Life, Liberty, and Happiness? Haven't we come to expect and demand happiness? Don't we all feel the clock ticking to find happiness and fulfillment in our lives? When we cannot achieve it, aren't we resentful of those who have?

Of course, our Declaration of Independence talks only of the "Pursuit of Happiness." Life offers no such guarantees. The problem comes when we build expectations - when we see people who are busy and assume that they're happy. We want that too.

What most of us are looking for when we say we want "happiness" is excitement (as opposed to boredom) and fulfillment (as opposed to being discontented and always longing for something more).

Samuel Butler is quite right in saying that knowing how to find these things and expand ourselves through our knowledge of these things is no small task.

Posted by: David at ReflectionsCoachingLLC.com | June 23, 2007 at 02:46 PM

Hi Gretchen,

I recently picked up a book at my local library that I think you'd find interesting: On Desire: Why we want what we want, by William B Irvine, (OUP 2006).

It's a philosophical investigation of desire and is filled with thought-provoking quotes. Besides the subject matter, it's all the quotes that made me think of you!

I've been enjoying your blog for several months now.

Jessica

Posted by: Jessica | June 23, 2007 at 06:16 PM

Linked to you today in a post I wrote on How to Be Happy. Added you to my blog roll as well. I love your site! -kevin

Posted by: Kevin Bedell | June 24, 2007 at 12:21 AM

Hi, Found a cool news widget for our blogs at http://www.widgetmate.com/news . Now I can show the latest news on my blog. Worked like a breeze.

Posted by: Mark Vane | June 25, 2007 at 09:43 AM

Thanks for the recommendation of On Desire -- just the kind of thing I love, and in fact, I've already read it! Thanks for sending along the suggestion, right on target.

Kevin -- thanks for shinining a spotlight on the Happiness Project and for your kind words, I'm off to check out your site right this minute.

Posted by: Gretchen Rubin | June 25, 2007 at 05:21 PM

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Gretchen Rubin is a best-selling writer whose new book, The Happiness Project, is an account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. On this blog, she shares her insights to help you create your own happiness project.