Happy Ever After Quotes

“If a woman does marry, I suggest she has her own bed.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“The more people are convinced by the ‘just enough’ approach, the more likely they will be to limit their material consumption, and favour redistributing resources away from those with more than enough towards those with little.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“As a politician, if you are really interested in tackling inequality to ensure that as many people as possible have ‘just enough’, then you need to ensure that the rich stop using, as Stiglitz puts it, ‘their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending’.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“the real route out of poverty is to pay a living wage to the millions of care workers, teaching assistants, cleaners and labourers. And to afford these jobs the status their impact on society deserves.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“We found that the self-affirmation writing task improved maths performance for free-school-meal students only, closing the existing achievement gap between these two groups by 50 per cent over the course of the year.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“When it comes to weighing up evidence, we like to think of ourselves as deliberative and detached. We think carefully about the arguments and form an opinion or a belief in a dispassionate way. In reality, though, our beliefs often come first and then we search for evidence to support them. When the evidence supports a belief, we are proud of being right in the first place.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“Attending to being wealthy also means that we harshly judge others for being happy with what they have – we might call them unambitious or lazy – thus preserving the status quo and making it more likely that more people will be miserable with what they have. So we need to stop judging others as lazy, uninspiring or unambitious when they report being happy as they are. The narrative of reaching for wealth stigmatizes those who do not want more money. Let’s instead celebrate those who choose to devote their time and effort to causes of social worth rather than question them for not accumulating more personal wealth. Social media could be a great catalyst for this too.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“Even without the constant bombardment to reach for more wealth, ‘just enough’ can still sound like a weak counter-narrative to ‘keep striving for more’. But even if it appears boring to accept that you (may) have enough wealth already, it can also be tremendously liberating. Once you have enough money to afford the basic things you want in life, you can stop constantly worrying.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well