All Quotes By Tag: Happiness
“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
-
“When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we’re doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, “Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?” That forgetting — that pure absorption — is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls “flow” or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living — bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we’re engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women’s lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call “antiflow.” Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there’s an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we’re doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One’s Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, “Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said ‘abracadabra’ the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).”
-
“Without struggle, success has no value.”
-
“In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy…to wit–the wag of a dog’s tail.”
-
“Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.”
-
“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”
-
“He tapped my chest. ‘Happy is here.’ He tapped his own chest. ‘Here.’I looked down past my chin. ‘Inside?”Inside.’It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.”
-
“These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on one’s own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercise, aerobics, martial arts for those who prefer concentrating on physical skills. Any specialization or expertise that one finds enjoyable and where one can improve one’s knowledge over time. The important thing, however, is the attitude toward these disciplines. If one prays in order to be holy, or exercises to develop strong pectoral muscles, or learns to be knowledgeable, then a great deal of the benefit is lost. The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
-
“Culture is an elevated expression of the inner voice which the different peoples of the Earth have heard in the depths of their being, a voice which conveys the vibrant compassion and wisdom of the cosmic life. For different cultures to engage in interaction is to catalyze each other’s souls and foster mutual understanding.”
-
“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. —And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls.”
-
“if you feel happy, Smile with all your heart. if you’re down, smile with all your might.”
“I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don’t normally get to go.”
-
“Mother earth cried so much that she has pool of tears more than the land of happiness.”
-
“i have laughedmore than daffodilsand cried more than June.”
-
“Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom”
-