The Happiness Project Quotes

“But not wearing clothes is as wasteful as throwing them away.”
― 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, as a follow-up, I asked myself, “Can money help buy happiness?” The answer: yes, used wisely, it can.”
― 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 takes at least five good acts to repair the damage of one critical or destructive act.”
― 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

“Now, I see that it’s like saving money, you can’t save for when you get laid off, after you get laid off; rather, you have to save while you have a job and the money is still coming in. Life is like that, you have to DO while you are able to think of what you want, what you like, what needs it will fill, how it will enhance your life, how it will help you to maintain you, so that you have some reserves when crunch time comes.”
― 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 don’t notice your mistakes as much as you think.”
― 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

“Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness.”
― 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

“I remember talking to a friend whose parents had been very involved in the civil rights movement. “They always said,” he told me, “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: 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 buy any kind of device, put the cords, the manual, all that stuff in a labeled Ziploc bag. You avoid having a big tangle of mystery cords, plus when you get rid of the device, you can get rid of the ancillary parts, too.”
― 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

“First of all, by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. Also, arrival often brings more work and responsibility. It’s rare to achieve something (other than winning an award) that brings unadulterated pleasure without added concerns. Having a baby. Getting a promotion. Buying a house. You look forward to reaching these destinations, but once you’ve reached them, they bring emotions other than sheer happiness”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish. Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It is by studying little things,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “that we attain the great art of having as little misery, and as much happiness as possible.”
― 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

“Although people believe they like to have lots of choice, in fact, having too many choices can be discouraging.”
― 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

“by acting with more love, finding work you”
― 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

“happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts. In other words, people have an inborn disposition that’s set within a certain range, but they can boost themselves to the top of their happiness range or push themselves down to the bottom of their happiness range by their actions.”
― 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

“I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started—no longer.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you like to do.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal. Publishing the first book means it’s time to start the second. There’s another hill to climb. The challenge, therefore, is to take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“discouraging as he’d been, hadn’t actually hit on my real worry about my project: Was it supremely self-centered to spend so much effort on my own happiness?”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition. Elizabeth’s observation made me wonder about my motivations. Was I searching for spiritual growth and a life more dedicated to transcendent principles—or was my happiness project just an attempt to extend my driven, perfectionist ways to every aspect of my life?”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Any single happy experience may be amplified or minimized, depending on how much attention you give it.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Recently I’d been intrigued to read about a self-publishing site, Lulu.com. According to the Web site, I could print a proper hardback book, complete with dust jacket, for less than thirty dollars.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin’s “We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss” and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum explosion of alternate future.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Don't grieve limitations”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: "On the whole, though I never arrived at perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Epicurus agreed, albeit in slightly more poetic phraseology: "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

“My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I'd become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success... "I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn't.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project