The Happiness Project Quotes

“And a sense of purpose is very important to happiness. But”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn’t hard to understand.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Learning that men and women both turn to women for understanding showed me that Jamie wasn’t ignoring me out of lack of interest or affection; he just wasn’t good at giving that kind of support. Jamie wasn’t going to have a long discussion about whether”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“often felt frustrated because he never wanted to have long heart-to-heart discussions. In particular, I wished that he would take more interest in my work.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference. Learning about this research made a difference in my attitude toward Jamie. I love him with all my heart,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“marriage, it’s less important to have many pleasant experiences than it is to have fewer unpleasant experiences, because people have a “negativity bias”; our reactions to bad events are faster, stronger, and stickier than our reactions to good events. In fact, in practically every language,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory. Any single happy experience may be amplified or minimized, depending on how much attention you give it.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“But whatever a wide-ranging study might show about the connection between ambition and happiness generally, I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious. For example, if I’d been feeling unhappy, I doubt I would have proposed forming a writers’ strategy group. I wouldn’t have wanted to open myself up to rejection or failure.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Enjoy now.” If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future. The fun part doesn’t come later, now is the fun part. That’s another reason I feel lucky to enjoy my work so much. If you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy and you don’t have the gratification of success, failure is particularly painful. But doing what you love is itself the reward.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“It didn’t take me long to see that I did better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“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. What’s more, because novelty requires more work from the brain, dealing with novel situations evokes more intense emotional responses and makes the passage of time seem slower and richer.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“My mother had observed that when people talk often, they have a lot to say to each other, and when they talk rarely, they have little to say to each other. So now my mother, father, Elizabeth, and I have “update.” Every several days, we send out an e-mail with the subject “update,” and we recount the most mundane, daily details of our lives. The motto of “update” is “It’s okay to be boring.” There’s no expectation that anyone send a response. What we’ve found is that knowing these dull little details of one another’s lives makes us feel far more connected to one another, and when we do talk, we have a lot more to say. This idea of “update” has really resonated with other people.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Es gribēju sevi pāraudzināt un vienlaikus pieņemt sevi tādu, kāda esmu. Vēlējos uztvert sevi ne tik nopietni - un arī nopietnāk. Gribēju lietderīgi izmantot laiku, bet gribēju arī klaiņot apkārt, izklaidēties, lasīt, kad ienāk prātā. Gribēju domāt par sevi tā, lai varētu aizmirst sevi.”
― Grēthena Rūbina, The Happiness Project

“Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week—and they work more in their free time, too. They tend to be more cooperative, less self-centered, and more willing to help other people—say, by sharing information or pitching in to help a colleague—and then, because they’ve helped others, others tend to help them.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“When you give up expecting a spouse to change (within reason), you lessen anger and resentment, and that creates a more loving atmosphere in a marriage.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Purpose? Hope? None of these words seemed right. Then I thought of a line from William Butler Yeats. “Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“The more readily you respond to a spouse’s bids for attention, the stronger your marriage—but it’s easy to fall into bad habits.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Knowing what you admire in others is a wonderful mirror into your deepest, as yet unborn, self.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Gratitude brings freedom from envy, because when you're grateful for what you have, you're not consumed with wanting something different or something more. That, in turn, makes it easier to live within your means and also to be generous to others.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Life is too short to save your good china or your good lingerie or your good ANYTHING for later because truly, later may never come”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you like to do. You can do anything you want, but you can't do everything you want.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you're better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that's where you will be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“They always said that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don't expect other people to react in a particular way.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I'd noticed idly that a lot of people use the term "goal" instead of "resolution", and one day in December, it struck me that this difference was in fact significant. You 'hit' a goal, you 'keep' a resolution.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“People are more likely to make progress on goals that are broken into concrete, measurable actions, with some kind of structured accountability and positive reinforcement.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“Accomplish more by working less.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

“People assume that a person who acts happy must feel happy, but although it’s in the very nature of happiness to seem effortless and spontaneous, it often takes great skill.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun