“The physics of love and happiness are counterintuitive. As long as we are stuck in the need to receive—in the cycle of grasping and clinging and demanding that people and the world around us meet our needs—we will be locked into disappointment, anger, and misery. The sweet paradox is being fulfilled by giving, that your output precipitates the input—giving and receiving become simultaneous. To love and to be loved is the highest human reward and ecstasy. Allowing the best within you to serve and unleash the best within others is the most intense of human pleasures.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 402)
“There is nothing that you can receive from the material world that will create inner peace or fulfillment. The truth is, ‘the Smile’ is generated through output. It’s not something you get, it’s something you cultivate through giving. In the end, it will not matter one single bit how well they loved you—you will only gain ‘the Smile’ based on how well you loved them.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 402)
“The problem is, the more you get, the more you want. It’s like drinking salt water to quench your thirst. We develop a tolerance that makes us need more just to get the same high. I started to recognize the game, the trick, the insanity, the carrot on the stick. I had never liked vampire movies, but I suddenly understood their mythology—they are a metaphor for insatiable human hunger, unquenchable thirsts, and chronic dissatisfaction—the attempt to fill a spiritual hole with external things. If unparalleled winning and achieving everything I’ve ever dreamed of does not secure perfect happiness and ultimate bliss, then what does?”
Will Smith, Will (Page 368)
“To place the responsibility for your happiness on anybody other than yourself is a recipe for misery.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 357)
“We had concluded that no one can make a person happy. You can make a person smile; you can compose a moment that helps a person to feel good; you can deliver a joke that makes a person laugh; you can create an environment where a person feels safe. We can and must be helpful and kind and loving, but whether a person is happy or not is utterly out of your control. Every person must wage a solitary internal war for their own contentment.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 357)
“‘If I am more successful, I’ll be happier, and people will love me more.’ I was trying to fill an internal emotional hole with external, material achievements. Ultimately, this kind of obsession is insatiable. The more you get, the more you want, all the time never quite scratching the itch. You end up with a mind consumed by what it doesn’t have and what it didn’t get, and in a spiraling inability to enjoy what it has.”
Will Smith, Will (Page 333)
“Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend to the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 12)
“Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 231)
“You are not supposed to feel happy all of the time. Trying to feel happy all of the time is not the solution; it’s the problem.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 225)
The Lazy Cat or The Enlightened Monk? You Decide…
Excerpt: Is the following short story about a lazy cat or of an enlightened monk? Read this thought-provoking short story and decide for yourself…
Read More »The Lazy Cat or The Enlightened Monk? You Decide…
“If you are doing ‘everything you are supposed to be doing’ and yet you feel empty and depressed at the end of the day, the issue is probably that you’re not really doing what you want to be doing; you’ve just adopted someone else’s script for happiness.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 60)