The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Oscar Wilde.

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 Oscar Wilde.

"I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me.” --Oscar Wilde

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If you're starting your own happiness project, you might like to join the Happiness Project Group on Facebook to swap ideas. It's easy, it's free.

Posted September 29, 2007

Comments

Hi Gretchen! I love your blog and cannot wait to read your book! I just added your blog link to my site - I'm also writing about self-improvement, but not so much happiness :)
(www.creatingmsperfect.blogspot.com)

Posted by: Kim | September 29, 2007 at 01:22 PM

Gretchen,

Great quote.

It is often said that we can increase our happiness simply by having a better attitude. This may be true, but it isn't so easy to do when our thoughts are consumed with regrets and guilt about things we did and happened to us in the past.

We can't change our past, but we can change our perceptions of it - we can change our own realities.

Success and happiness don't happen overnight. Change is incremental, but we'll contunue to expand so long as we learn from our mistakes, put the past behind us, and continually work to learn and grow.

Posted by: David B. Bohl at SlowDownFAST.com/blog | September 30, 2007 at 12:04 AM

Oscar, truly, was the man. Have to love when we're doing, in order to be successful.

Posted by: Modern Worker | October 01, 2007 at 02:29 PM

"Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix
anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher
place. Start right where you are." -- Julia Cameron

Posted by: Me | October 03, 2007 at 09:15 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.