The Happiness Project Quotes

“I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play "The Blue Bird," where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“You hit> a goal, you keep a resolution.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Forbearance is a form of generosity.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“الزواج الناجح أحد أهم وأقوى العوامل المرتبطة بالسعادة”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Experts say that denying bad feelings intensifies them, acknowledging bad feelings allows good feelings to return.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“We are happy when we are growing.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“...arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.
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― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal practices or cite up-to-date studies.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence--easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Contemporary research shows that happy people are more altruistic, more productive, more helpful, more likable, more creative, more resilient, more interested in others, friendlier, and healthier. Happy people make better friends, colleagues, and citizens.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit. Neither a scientist nor a philosopher but a novelist, Lisa Grunwald, came up with the most brilliant summation of this happiness principle: “Best is good, better is best.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“One of life’s small pleasures is to return something to its proper place;”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I started to apply the “one-minute rule”; I didn’t postpone any task that could be done in less than one minute.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“The words of the writer Colette had haunted me for years: “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“According to Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I don't want to reject my life. I want to change my life without changing my life.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all—yet somehow they do.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Instead of always worrying about being efficient, I wanted to spend time on exploration, experimentation, digression, and failed attempts that didn’t always look productive.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“By mindfully deciding how to act in line with my values instead of mindlessly applying my rules, I was better able to make the decisions that supported my happiness.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that if you have something you love or there's something you want, you'll be happier with more.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“As Samuel Johnson said, "To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.” Activities that contribute to long-term happiness don’t always make me feel good in the short term; in fact they’re sometimes downright unpleasant.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project