Happy Quotes

“We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“we are terrible at reading each other’s thoughts. Yet we consistently behave as if we have been endowed with this entirely handsome ability.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Schopenhauer wrote, ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one's life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“We see the illusion of individual predilection being maintained, for example, in the array of different styles of iPhone cases available to us. We wonder which of the provided range of colourful or sophisticated sheaths best communicates to the world our unique character. Thus we lean towards the wood effect, or the Batman one (ironically sported, of course), or the vintage Union Jack. Meanwhile, it is much harder to honestly ask ourselves whether our lives would be improved were we not to be attached to our devices quite as umbilically, and how much misery they bring us alongside the various conveniences and amusements. Whether we might be more authentically ourselves if, with a pioneering and curious spirit, we occasionally left them at home. It”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“the mantra of ‘you can be anything’ creates more pain than pleasure.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“I also find Mill’s words to be of use when considering relationships. Often we want our friends, partners and people we love to be like us, because that allows us to feel validated and accepted. It is a powerful thing to find people in this world who share our values and instincts. But it is also important to celebrate the differences between our partners and us. Would we really want to be in a relationship where the other person reminds us every day of ourselves? Wouldn’t it just be like having rich chocolate cake every day? Do we even especially like people who are very much like us? Don’t we find ourselves cynical of their motives, believing we can see right through them? Love seems to come without a template. We may think we know what we want in a partner and then one day find ourselves in love for very different reasons. In the same way that differing, developed individuals contribute to Mill’s view of society and make it worth belonging to, so too the differences between people in a relationship can be precisely the substance of what makes it valuable. And then, rather than falling for that old fallacy of entering into a relationship thinking you will ‘change’ the other person to more comfortably reflect your values, you might see the qualities that separate them from you as precisely the features to celebrate. These qualities can complement our own: our laid-back approach to life can be challenged by the more active, dynamic ambition we might see in a partner, or vice versa. When the time comes, it will be useful to have them in mind as a role model. And to echo Mill: as our partners develop their own unique qualities, they can become of more value to themselves and therefore to the relationship as a whole.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Aristotle also felt strongly that virtue requires action; mere noble intentions are not enough.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke gave us the law ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“It is intoxicating in the first six months of love to pledge ourselves for the rest of our lives. It is also brave and deeply caring to accept, at least quietly to oneself, that this may prove untenable, or that a lifespan may not turn out to be the generous stretch of time we imagined. That knowledge might then flood us with a more steadfast kind of love that values the present rather than venerating an imagined future and, unlike the inflamed delirium of its early incarnation that flickers and wanes, grows only brighter with bounded time.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“As Joseph Campbell wrote about middle age, ‘There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“The kind of self-image we may be best advised to seek, then, is not of ourselves as beautiful winners (as we are often told we should), but one wherein our strengths and weaknesses are realistically appraised with neither self-aggrandisement nor abnegation, and our share of inevitable failings looked upon with kindness and good humour.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know;”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“There is at the heart of Romanticism an urge to withdraw into oneself in order to then transcend the boundaries of that self and connect with nature and the larger order.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity for formulate with certainty.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“WE GENERALLY FEEL defined by our past. Our past, however, is a story that we tell ourselves in the present.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“You should live in the moment’ is as unhelpful an imperative as ‘You should believe in yourself and secure the future you want’. The only ‘should’ we need ever take on board is that we ‘should’ get on with our lives without hurting other people.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why more or less everything is absolutely fine

“The Greeks understood this relationship between man and the machinations of the universe. Their tragedies taught us that we need to learn raw humility in the fickle face of fate. Tragic heroes marched out into the world full of pride, biased vision and a mighty capacity for self-deception. Fate ultimately brought them to their knees. The lesson for us is not that we are doomed but that we must reassess the control we think we wield.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“By contrast, a considered life is one in which we deeply engage with our own story. That means we need to identify what our story is and then know how to move it forward. If we don’t – if we swing between pain and boredom, or merely defy those who would dare to tell us what to do – we shut off important channels of development (and, therefore, life). We are often most aware of this at work: the jobs that we chose in our twenties no longer appeal to us in our thirties or forties, once we’ve grown up and changed in all our other areas of life. We might hope for a promotion, but a step upwards will not comfort our soul if what it yearns for is a sideways leap into new adventures.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

“The meaning of life,’ wrote Kafka, reputedly, ‘is that it stops.”
― Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine