The Happiness Myth Quotes

“How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.”
― Jennifer Hecht, The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today – A Liberating Vision for Caring for Hearts, Minds, and Bodies

“Aurelius says that one reason it doesn't matter how long you live is that this is not theatre, that the whole is not the thing. Each moment is the thing. "The soul obtains its own end, wherever the limit of life may be fixed. Not as...in a play...where the whole action is incomplete if anything cuts it short; but in every part and wherever it be stopped, it makes what has been set before it full and complete, so that it can say, 'I have what is my own.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“When we feel safe, when we feel we are with someone who basically agrees with us about the symbolic universe, we let down our defenses, confident that our companion understands the symbols that are usually wall up, and will act appropriately.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Though you work like mad to keep parts of you undiscovered, it is horrible to imagine that you will be completely successful. As the psychologist D.W. Winnicott wrote, "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“A lot of campaigning for food purity is a translated worry about abundance. You still eat your fill, but you agonize over the food's contents. We are a pack of animals that allows some to have excess food while others starve. Those who have so much get finicky about what is good to eat; they become obsessed by it, re-creating scarcity for themselves so as to not feel guilty, confused, or dangerously envied.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“2004 film called What the Bleep Do We Know!?”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Some were taking this or that nervine cure-all, but the best nervine for a man who is not absolutely past repair, is to break away entirely from his calling or greed and camp out on the sea shore...and patiently wait for the return of good health." James Bradley”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“Why do people report themselves to be as happy as they were back when we all had less? Well, for one thing, we are comparing two societies that are both majestically wealthy in comparison to almost all societies throughout history. Neither the surveyed Americans of the 1950s nor those of the 2000s were struggling with endemic distress- hunger, pain, humiliation. And average people who are not in such distress are statistically more likely to call themselves happy than not.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong

“To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves...We ask for the complete development of every indicidual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork, and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities, then each man bears his own burden.”
― Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong