“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.”

Mark Frauenfelder

more info

“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.”

Walter Murch

more info

“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”

Lynda Barry

more info

“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.”

W. Béran Wolfe

more info

“I’m happier being outside the flow.”

Nicholson Baker

more info

“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.”

Simon Van Booy

more info

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

more info

“It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one’s sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”

Theodore Roosevelt

more info

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”

Tobias Wolff

more info

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”

Kurt Vonnegut

more info

“How little is needed for happiness! The note of a bagpipe. — Without music life would be a mistake.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

more info

“I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves.”

John Cage

more info

“This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t.”

Woody Allen

more info

“The thing about food is you’re a much happier person if you eat well and treasure your meals.”

Julia Child

more info

“Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to proceed with the day before.”

James Joseph Walsh

more info