Sonja Lyubomirsky · 384 pages
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“[Optimism] is not about providing a recipe for self-deception. The world can be a horrible, cruel place, and at the same time it can be wonderful and abundant. These are both truths. There is not a halfway point; there is only choosing which truth to put in your personal foreground.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“The face of happiness may be someone who is intensely curious and enthusiastic about learning; it may be someone who is engrossed in plans for his next five years; it may be someone who can distinguish between the things that matter and the things that don’t; it may be someone who looks forward each night to reading to her child. Some happy people may appear outwardly cheerful or transparently serene, and others are simply busy. In other words, we all have the potential to be happy, each in our own way.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present oriented.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“happiness, more than anything, is a state of mind, a way of perceiving and approaching ourselves and the world in which we reside.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Forgiving people are less likely to be hateful, depressed, hostile, anxious, angry, and neurotic.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Still others assert that they have grown enormously as a result of their traumatic experience, discovering a maturity and strength of character that they didn’t know they had—for example, reporting having found “a growth and a freedom to…give fuller expression to my feelings or to assert myself.” A new and more positive perspective is a common theme among those enduring traumas or loss, a renewed appreciation of the preciousness of life and a sense that one must live more fully in the present. For example, one bereaved person rediscovered that “having your health and living life to the fullest is a real blessing. I appreciate my family, friends, nature, life in general. I see a goodness in people.”12 A woman survivor of a traumatic plane crash described her experience afterward: “When I got home, the sky was brighter. I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie.”13 Construing benefit in negative events can influence your physical health as well as your happiness, a remarkable demonstration of the power of mind over body. For example, in one study researchers interviewed men who had had heart attacks between the ages of thirty and sixty.14 Those who perceived benefits in the event seven weeks after it happened—for example, believing that they had grown and matured as a result, or revalued home life, or resolved to create less hectic schedules for themselves—were less likely to have recurrences and more likely to be healthy eight years later. In contrast, those who blamed their heart attacks on other people or on their own emotions (e.g., having been too stressed) were now in poorer health.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“D. A., and Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy?: A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9: 340–46.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“I use the term happiness to refer to the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“It may be obvious that to achieve anything substantial in life—learn a profession, master a sport, raise a child—a good deal of effort is required.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Approximately one-third of all homes in 1940 did not have running water, indoor toilets, or bathtub/showers, and more than half had no central heating. If you were twenty-five years or older in 1940, you would have stood only a 40 percent chance of having completed the eighth grade, a 25 percent chance of having graduated from high school, and only a 5 percent chance of having finished college.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Sometimes when I’m facing a horrendous week or am upset over a perceived slight, I remind myself that I won’t remember it (much less care about it) one month, six months, or a year from now. (The more extreme version of this strategy is to use the deathbed criterion: Will it matter when you’re on your deathbed?)”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“Finally, if you resolve that the trouble you're enduring now is indeed significant and will matter in a year, then consider what the experience can teach you. Focusing on the lessons you can learn from a stress, irritant, or ordeal will help soften its blow. The lessons that those realities impart could be patience, perseverance, loyalty, or courage. Or perhaps you're learning open-mindedness, forgiveness, generosity, or self-control. Psychologists call this posttraumatic growth, and it's one of the vital tools used by happy, resilient people in facing the inevitable perils and hardships of life.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“our expectations about what our lives should be like are greater than ever before; we believe that we can do anything, and we are profoundly disappointed when reality doesn’t meet or even come close to perfection.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
“We found that the happiest people take pleasure in other people’s successes and show concern in the face of others’ failures. A completely different portrait, however, has emerged of a typical unhappy person—namely, as someone who is deflated rather than delighted about his peers’ accomplishments and triumphs and who is relieved rather than sympathetic in the face of his peers’ failures and undoings.”
― Sonja Lyubomirsky, quote from The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
Sonja Lyubomirsky
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“Ranger is an unusual name," she managed. "Is it a nickname?"
It's a street name," Ranger said. "I was a Ranger in the army."
I heard about them Rangers on TV," Grandma said. "I heard they get dogs pregnant."
My father's mouth dropped open and a piece of ham fell out.
My mother froze, her fork poised in midair.
That's sort of a joke," I told Grandma. "Rangers don't get dogs pregnant in real life."
I looked at Ranger for corroboration and got another smile.”
― Janet Evanovich, quote from Three to Get Deadly
“I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
“As George removed the cork and began very slowly to pour the thick brown stuff into the spoon,”
― Roald Dahl, quote from George's Marvellous Medicine
“I think nighttime is dark so you can imagine your fears with less distraction.”
― Bill Watterson, quote from The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes
“What is society but an individual? [...] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.”
― Osamu Dazai, quote from No Longer Human
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