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

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 Johnson.

"Sir, it is surprising how people will go to a distance for what they may have at home." --Samuel Johnson.

*
Here on vacation, where I rejoice to find my favorite brand of salsa in the store or WiFi at the library, I think of this remark by Johnson. And laugh at myself.

Posted August 4, 2007

Comments

AMAZING quote :D
That's ABSOLUTELY true !!

Posted by: Clueless | August 05, 2007 at 06:10 AM

Ah, how amazingly true. Thanks for the quote!

Posted by: Janna | August 05, 2007 at 06:01 PM

You might have seen this graphic since it's been on several blogs, but just in case, check out the Life Instructions at http://glass.typepad.com/journal/2007/06/making_happy.html

I printed a couple of copies--one to post at the high school library where I start work next week, and one to post at home.

Posted by: Jude | August 06, 2007 at 02:27 AM

That's such a great image, Jude! I'm also going to put up a copy in the elementary school library where I start working in a couple of weeks.

Posted by: Katie | August 06, 2007 at 09:59 AM

Jude -- what a great graphic! I love distillation of the happiness wisdom -- and the pictures are so fitting and hilarious. A real find. I would link to it in a post myself, but here on vacation, that's too complicated a tech task to attack.

Posted by: Gretchen Rubin | August 06, 2007 at 01:41 PM

Wonderful quote!
So very true!

Posted by: margie | August 09, 2007 at 11:21 AM

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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.