Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

The places and things that insist most loudly that they will make us happy rarely do.

we are all disturbed to one degree or another, all somehow repressed and to varying extents shut off from our true selves: this is the human condition and precisely what we should address to increase our quotient of happiness.

‘Ordinary men,’ Schopenhauer wrote (and we can include the ladies too), ‘are intent merely on how to spend their time; a man with any talent is interested in how to use his time.’

It may give the illusion of authorship, but ‘fuck you’ is too much about the ‘you’; its centre of gravity is external.

‘Say to every harsh appearance – “you are an appearance, and not the only way of seeing the thing that appears,”’