The Happiness Project Quotes

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Studies show that if you have five or more friends with whom to discuss an important matter, you’re far more likely to describe yourself as “very happy.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s daily happiness than getting a $ 60,000 raise.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“The single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Apply the "one minute rule". Don't postpone anything that could be done in less than a minute”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It was interesting to have a better sense of my daily habits”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“A study of workers in various industries showed that their job satisfaction was less tied to their salaries than to how their salaries compared to their coworkers’ salaries. People understand the significance of this principle: in one study, a majority of people chose to earn $50,000 where others earned $25,000, rather than earn $100,000 where others earned $250,000.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“...perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea–the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Walking had an added benefit: it helped me to think. Nietzsche wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and his observation is backed up by science; exercise-induced brain chemicals help people think clearly. In fact, just stepping outside clarifies thinking and boosts energy. Light deprivation is one reason that people feel tired, and even five minutes of daylight stimulates production of serotonin and dopamine, brain chemicals that improve mood. Many times, I’d guiltily leave my desk to take a break, and while I was walking around the block, I’d get some useful insight that had eluded me when I was being virtuously diligent.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Epicurus wrote, “We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.” 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. I wanted to be one of those people.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Feeling right” is about living the life that’s right for you—in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It’s also about virtue: doing your duty,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Pushing myself, I knew, would cause me serious discomfort. It's a Secret of Adulthood: Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy. When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure–but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure... To counteract this fear, I told myself, 'I enjoy the fun of failure.' 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

“When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“one Secret of Adulthood is “Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense’”? “And”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: 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

“couldn’t just jump into this happiness project. I had a lot to learn before I was ready for my year to begin. After my first few weeks of heavy reading, as I toyed with different ideas about how to set up my experiment, I called my younger sister, Elizabeth. After”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“The bus was hardly moving, but I could hardly keep pace with my own thoughts. “I’ve got to tackle this,” I told myself. “As soon as I have some free time, I should start a happiness project.” But I never had any free time. When life was taking its ordinary course, it was hard to remember what really mattered; if I wanted a happiness project, I’d have to make the time. I had a brief vision of myself living for a month on a picturesque, windswept island, where each day I would gather seashells, read Aristotle, and write in an elegant parchment journal. Nope, I admitted, that’s not going to happen. I needed to find a way to do it here and now. I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar. All”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Studies show that in a phenomenon called “emotional contagion,” we unconsciously catch emotions from other people—whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we’re infecting one another with good cheer, and people who enjoy silliness are one third more likely to be happy. As”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“Jamie is a funny mix. He has a sardonic side that can make him seem distant and almost harsh to people who don’t know him well, but he’s also very tender-hearted. (A”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“the marriage expert John Gottman calls the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for their destructive role in relationships: stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, and contempt. Well,”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“a quotation from Lewis’s brilliant essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”: 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

“the “Hawthorne effect,” in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting. In”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“According to current research, in the determination of a person’s level of 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

“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.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“I’m not getting any sleep,” she said. “I’ve already given up caffeine. What else can I do?” “Lots of things,” I said, prepared to rattle off the tips that I’d uncovered in my research. “Near your bedtime, don’t do any work that requires alert thinking. Keep your bedroom slightly chilly. Do a few prebed stretches. Also—this is important—because light confuses the body’s circadian clock, keep the lights low around bedtime, say, if you go to the bathroom. Also, make sure your room is very dark when the lights are out. Like a hotel room.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“We all know the secret of dieting—eat better, eat less, exercise more—it’s the application that’s challenging. I had to create a scheme to put happiness ideas into practice in my life.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“studies show that the absence of feeling bad isn’t enough to make you happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good. One”
― 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.” You”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project