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.”

Happiness quotation from Elizabeth Gaskell.

GaskellI never knew what sad work the reading of old letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be—at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth.
--Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

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That's the Third Splendid Truth: The days are long, but the years are short.

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Comments

Today Elizabeth Gaskell probably would have said "I never knew what sad work the reading of old E-mails..." ;)

Very beautiful, thanks for sharing Gretchen.

It's nice to see you reading Elizabeth Gaskell! I discovered _Wives and Daughters_ about a year ago, and love her commonplace descriptions of everyday life; they're very "happiness-inducing" for me!

I'm glad to see you're focusing on happiness. In my travels in life, I notice some people really struggle with happiness. I was abandoned at the age of four and I'm very familiar with the look in people's eyes regarding unhappiness. My life went from dark to light in seconds.

It never changed until I learned how to permanently remove the pain of having your life shattered. Rebuilding my life became my obsession and I did it. I insisted on learning why something worked for me. Today, I can now teach others the steps that take them back to happiness. I've learned how to permanently remove the pain and triggers that can bring the pain back.

It pleases me to see others reaching out to others. Keep up the good work.

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Gretchen RubinGretchen 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.


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