Happiness for Beginners Quotes

“Getting what you want doesn't make you happy... Having doesn't make you happy: appreciating does; Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I gave you Jake because you’re headstrong and accident prone, and he’s our medic and I trust him to patch you up. I gave you Jake because you’re the best map reader we’ve got, and he’s damn near blind. And I gave you Jake because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“It's my battle cry: Appreciate Everything!”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Well, for example, happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“The most important thing to remember is that getting what you want doesn’t make you happy. Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“It’s sadness that gives happiness its meaning.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I just wanted to be good at this. And competent. And tough. And, ultimately, just: anybody but me. I was tired of being a disaster. I was tired of being a trampled-on flower. I wanted to be awesome. That wasn't too much, was it?”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I guess who you are always seems normal to you because you don’t know what it feels like to be anyone else.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“After all, life will hand each one of us our fair share of despair and loss and suffering—and then some. That’s certain. But just as certain: It will also give us slices of chocolate cake, and sunny, seventy-two-degree days, and breezes that rustle the trees. Good things are so easy to overlook, but that doesn’t make them any less there.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Even just trying, I decided, could be an act of bravery in itself.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“You can’t understand this yet, but that’s most of life: breaking your own promises to yourself.”
― katherine center, Happiness for Beginners

“I don’t think trying to be happy means you can never be sad,” I said. “Right?”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“The things you think about determine the things you think about”—meaning the more you focus on something, the more likely your brain is to focus on it.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Love is always a disaster, darling. That’s what makes it fun.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I'd saturate my brain with such an overabundance of gratitude for every little joy around me that I wouldn't have any room for envy, or loneliness, or sorrow...I'd be too insulated by happiness to even care.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“The lived on the mistaken assumption that their lives mattered, that life was essentially fair, that it was all going to wind up happy in the end. I knew what they didn’t—that everything you care about will disappear, that deserving a happy life doesn’t mean you can get one, and that there really is no one in the entire world you can count on but yourself.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Longing for you gave me something to hope for. Even when it was hopeless.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Only do not forget, if I wake up crying, it’s only because in my dream I’m a lost child, hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“Whales have a highly evolved language that works like sonar. They have special neurons called spindle cells. Human have them, too, and they’re linked with self-awareness, and compassion, and language. Except whales have had them about fifteen million years longer than we have.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“It just seems to me there’s enough pain in the world—and not nearly enough pleasure. I guess once you’ve had enough kidney stones, hot candle wax on the nipples seems less appealing.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have. I finally got that if you were always in a state of longing you could never truly get satisfied,”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“It’s my battle cry: Appreciate Everything.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“This was a moment in time that was already lost.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners

“I wondered if stating a preference to the universe just dared it to mess with me.”
― Katherine Center, Happiness for Beginners