Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

by Matthieu Ricard

achieving durable happiness as a way of being is a skill. It requires sustained effort in training the mind and developing a set of human qualities, such as inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love.

in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

Even if we display every outward sign of happiness, we can never be truly happy if we dissociate ourselves from the happiness of others.

The “wicked world syndrome” calls into question the very possibility of actualizing happiness. The battle would appear to be lost before it’s engaged.

André Comte-Sponville: “The wise man has nothing left to expect or to hope for. Because he is entirely happy, he needs nothing. Because he needs nothing, he is entirely happy.”

When individuals change by bringing their consciousness to maturity, the world changes too, because the world is made up of individuals.9

When we look outward, we solidify the world by projecting onto it attributes that are in no way inherent to it. Looking inward, we freeze the flow of consciousness when we conceive of an “I” enthroned between a past that no longer exists and a future that does not yet exist.

Genuine fearlessness arises with the confidence that we will be able to gather the inner resources necessary to deal with any situation that comes our way.

Thoughts emerge from pure consciousness and are then reabsorbed in it, just as waves emerge from the ocean and dissolve into it again.