happiness
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself…
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 ), 12.
Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 2.
I would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness.
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 153.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 18.
I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Part of it is just learning what makes me happier and doing more of it, and learning what makes me unhappier and doing less of it.
interview, The Happiness Project
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness then daffodils.
The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 17.
As I’ve gone through life, I’ve found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old…At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you’re not old enough yet to be overly influenced by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you think you “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself.
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje (New York: Random House, 2002).
The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.
Interview by Amy Kellner, Vice, October 1, 2008.
What you look for in the world is not simply for what you want to know, but for more than you want to know, and more than you can know, better than you had wished for, and sometimes something draws you to a discovery and there is no other happiness quite the same.
Letter to her agent Diarmuid Russell, reply to Russell’s Sept. 30, 1941 letter, in Author and Agent, by Michael Kreyling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 11.
If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.
How to Be Happy Though Human (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931).
I’m happier being outside the flow.
“The Mad Scientist of Smut,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, August 4, 2011.
I feel that happiness is not so much a sensation (although it can be if you’ve ever visited the Qigong foot-massage places in Chinatown) but a way of seeing, and therefore immediately possible.
“Literature: Siri Hustvedt and Simon Van Booy,” BOMB magazine, Issue 116, Summer 2011.