“Peak experiences are fun, but you always have to come back. Learning to appreciate ordinary moments is the key to a fulfilling life.”
Cory Muscara, Twitter
“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)
“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)
“Where do you find happiness? Is it out there somewhere waiting to be discovered? Under a rock? Out in the woods? Buried in the desert? Where do you find it? You don’t find happiness. You make it. You put forth effort. You work for it. You take on responsibility. You put yourself out there; you take risk to achieve a worthy goal. And in that pursuit, if you pay attention, if you look around, you will find happiness.”
Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom (Page 131)
“The joy of your spirit is the indication of your strength.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 164)
My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
Kurt Vonnegut
“There’s more stimulation, more options and more noise than ever before. The problem is that boredom is a partner with satisfaction and joy. It’s hard to overstimulate ourselves into those feelings.”
Seth Godin, Blog
“Spiritual effort and the joy that comes from understanding life go hand in hand like physical exertion and rest. Without physical exertion, there is no joy in rest; without spiritual effort, there can be no joyful understanding of life.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 105)
“Trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keep pleasures in check, or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It’s exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never run dry once you’ve laid claim to its source.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 227)
“Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
“They are so concerned for their life that their anxiety makes life unbearable, even when they have the things they think they want. Their very concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy… I will hold to the saying that: ‘Perfect joy is to be without joy. Perfect praise is to be without praise.’ If you ask ‘what ought to be done’ and ‘what ought not to be done’ on earth in order to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things…”
Thomas Merton, The Way Of Chuang Tzu, via Sunbeams (Page 53)
“The most beautiful moments in your life—what you might consider moments of bliss, joy, ecstasy, or utter peace—were moments when you were not thinking about anything at all. You were just being. Even without your thoughts, existence is.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 150)