Joyful Quotes

“Burnout often has as much boredom in it as exhaustion.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The only requirement is what you already have: an openness to discovering the joy that surrounds you.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color. Whether it’s a row of houses painted in bold swaths of candy hues or a display of colored markers in a stationery shop, vibrant color invariably sparks a feeling of delight.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“I realized that we all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Bright color operates like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. It stirs us out of complacency. The artist Fernand Léger related the story of a newly renovated factory in Rotterdam. “The old factory was dark and sad,” he noted. “The new one was bright and colored: transparent. Then something happened. Without any remark to the personnel, the clothes of the workers became neat and tidy.… They felt that an important event had just happened around them, within them.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The blossoming of the trees, the rising of the sun, the flow of the tides: these recurring events remind us of time’s circular nature and create an underlying cadence of joy that we can rely on.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Finding happiness isn’t a matter of creating a perfectly even-keeled experience of the world, where no sadness ever intrudes. Instead it means riding the waves of joy, and trying to find our way back upward when we’ve been knocked down. In renewal we find a kind of resilience, an ability to bounce back from difficulty by reigniting the optimism and hope that rises within us when we believe that joy will return.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“I’ve found that just saying the word “treehouse” causes people to smile, no matter their age. It is like a password to the inner child’s sanctum, a place both exotic and familiar, a place of memories and dreams. The treehouse doesn’t bring us to the highest elevations. It doesn’t offer the broadest vistas. Yet even a shabby, ramshackle tree shelter—a few old boards held together with bent nails and a rope ladder—will radiate more joy than the swankest hilltop estate.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Whether in hard times or good ones, the benefit of cycles is that they give us something to look forward to, and this anticipation can be a pleasure in its own right.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“But as [designer] Stuart Brown obsererves, the separation of work and play is a false construct. "The opposite of play is not work," he often says. "It's depression.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The power of the aesthetics of joy is that they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without our even being aware of it.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Access to nature has been shown to improve sleep quality, decrease blood pressure, and even lengthen lifespan. Large-scale studies conducted in the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands show that people living in greener areas have a lower incidence of anxiety and depression and display an ability to recover more quickly from stressful life events than those in less green areas.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Words allowed our ancestors to communicate their needs and agree on shared rules and goals. But when it came to building emotional rapport and motivating people to prioritize the needs of the group over personal desires, language was woefully inadequate. Song and dance instilled a sense of community on a visceral level. By being united in the same rhythm, people didn’t just think of themselves as part of a group; they saw, heard, and felt a harmony that stretched beyond the boundaries of their own bodies.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“But the god of good taste demands sacrifices, and it’s always the weird, quirky, awkward parts of ourselves that are first to be thrown on the pyre. Yet the weird, quirky, awkward parts are where the surprises lie and, therefore, a great deal of joy.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“In the aesthetic pleasure of wildness, these artists are cultivating a new kind of environmentalism, one that is rooted not in obligation but in joy.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Instead, I began to see the world as a reservoir of positivity that I could turn to at any time.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Le Corbusier: “The home should be the treasure chest of living.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Play is one of our greatest means of accessing delight, with deep roots in human life.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“If your environment makes you feel stable, balanced, and grounded, you’re more likely to feel confident taking measured risks and exploring new opportunities.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The circus and the flea market are so joyful because of the collection of rich, delightful sensations they offer. The abundance aesthetic is defined by a layering of color, texture, and pattern, and you don’t need a lot of stuff to achieve it.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Bright hues in the cityscape, found on street signs and in bike lanes, window boxes and graffiti, have become little gifts for me—small infusions of warmth and life.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Color is energy made visible. It activates an ancient circuit that lights up with pleasure at the idea of finding something sweet to eat. Now, in a world that contains rainbows of artificial colors, we still feel the same joy, even if a colorful object contains no physical nourishment.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“I was reminded of something the florist Sarah Ryhanen had said when we met in her studio. “The number one question you get when you have a flower shop is, ‘How long is this going to last?’” She shrugged her shoulders, as if she simultaneously understood the impetus for the question and was frustrated by it. “Sometimes the most beautiful experience with a flower is brief—like these garden roses from the field. They are so fragile because they put all their energy into making this intoxicating scent, which means that they don’t last more than twenty-four hours on your kitchen table. But those twenty-four hours you have to smell that flower are pretty amazing.” Our efforts to prolong our joy sometimes diminish its intensity, for example, when we choose blooms genetically engineered for hardiness over short-lived varieties bred for scent.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The problem is that an overemphasis on linear time tends to magnify the pain we feel when joy ebbs. If we view the future as a blank, uncertain space, then it’s hard to trust that joy will return once it has gone. Each downswing of joy feels like a regression, each nadir like stagnation. But if instead we can rely on the repetition of certain delights at regular intervals, then the wavelike quality of joy becomes more present in our lives. Cycles create a symmetry between past and future that reminds us joy will come back again.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Rhythms flow through our muscles, triggering the urge to dance or sway in time with the vibrations around us. In fact, just listening to music activates the motion centers of the brain, even when our bodies are still, which is why we often find ourselves snapping or tapping along to a beat without even realizing we’re doing so.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“Research shows that celebrating positive events with others increases our feeling that they will be there for us if we encounter tough times in the future. And not only that, but celebrating with others boosts our own joy. People who regularly celebrate positive events with others are happier than those who keep their good news to themselves; and couples who celebrate each other’s good news are happier in their relationships”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“The light walls and ceilings that make a room seem taller are also naturally more reflective, mimicking the diaphanous quality of light at elevation. Gradient washes (also called ombré) in pale colors evoke the way the sky’s hue naturally fades toward the horizon. Blue, as the color of the sky, is especially conducive to creating a transcendent feeling.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

“While good taste wants things to be simple and normal, joy thrives out on the edges of the bell curve. This is a different manifestation of the surprise aesthetic, one that disrupts our expectations of how things should look and behave. It has a rebellious insouciance, and I wondered what it might mean to add more of this offbeat spirit to our lives.”
― Ingrid Fetell Lee, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness