There are times in the lives of most of us,” observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
Experts say that denying bad feelings intensifies them, acknowledging bad feelings allows good feelings to return.
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. – GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier.
Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started.
When Churchill was running for office for the first time, he went door to door to ask for votes. He knocked on the door of an irritable man who, when Churchill introduced himself, said, “Vote for you? Why, I’d rather vote for the devil!” “I understand,” answered Churchill. “But in case your friend is not running, may I count on your support?
How about this,” I suggested. “Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, ‘I’ll get back on track tomorrow,’ try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter. Fail small, not big.
It’s been freeing to focus on what works for me rather than what’s wrong with me.
Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. – Journal of Thomas Merton.
This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.
The happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren’t those from a particular Tendency, but rather they’re the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their Tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build the lives that work for them.
If we want something to count in our lives, we should figure out a way to count it.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and every day, after writing, cross off the day with a big red X. “After a few days you’ll have a chain,” Seinfeld explained. “You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.
Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.” And whatever liberates our spirit while giving us mastery over ourselves is constructive.
Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.
Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.
In fact, for both men and women – and this finding struck me as highly significant – the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.
A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.
It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that if you have something you love or there’s something you want, you’ll be happier with more.
W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.