Gretchen Rubin

“Of course it's not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, asking myself whether I was happy had been a crucial step toward cultivating my happiness more wisely through my actions. Also, only through recognizing my happiness did I really appreciate it. Happiness depends partly on external circumstances, and it also depends on how you view those circumstances.-Gretchen Rubin”

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

“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.”

“Studies show that each common interest between people boosts the chances of a lasting relationship and also brings about a 2 percent increase in life satisfaction.”

“What you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while.”

“Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person's happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.”

“I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can't DO EVERYTHING I want.”

“Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.”

“To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.”

“He is my fate. He's my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.”

“However, if you want to know how people would like to be treated, it's more helpful to look at how they themselves act than what they say.”

“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.”

“I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasnt going to change unless I made it change.”

“I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar.”

“I wasn't sure how to answer. Could I tell him that one Secret of Adulthood is "Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense'"?”

“It's about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”

“There are no do overs and some things just aren't going to happen. It is a little sad but you just have to embrace what is”

“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.”

“[Benjamin Franklin]identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate--temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility--and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.”

“I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play "The Blue Bird," where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”

“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.”

“I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You'll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You'll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate small successes, that's what you'll do in adversity.”

“As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.”

“After someone's death, how strange to see the value drain away from his or her possessions; useful objects such as clothes, or dish towels, or personal papers become little more than trash.”

“I am living my real life, this is it. Now is now, and if I waited to be happier, waited to have fun, waited to do the things that I know I ought to do, I might never get the chance.”

“While some more passive forms of leisure, such as watching TV or surfing the Internet, are fun in the short term, over time, they don't offer nearly the same happiness as more challenging activities.”

“It's so easy to wish that we'd made an effort in the past, so that we'd happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.”

“I'm not tempted by things I've decided are off-limits, but once I've started something, I have trouble stopping. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.”

“Think about appearances. I wanted my apartment to be less cluttered, and also to look less cluttered.”

“It struck me as poignant that my long relationship with my beloved grandparents could be embodied in a few small objects. But the power of objects doesn't depend on their volume; in fact, my memories were better evoked by a few carefully chosen items than by a big assortment of things with vague associations.”

“You hit> a goal, you keep a resolution.”

“A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence--easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.”

“Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping--these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.”

“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.”

“[S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.”

“Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity”

“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”

“Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.”

“One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.”

“When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, "Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can’t indulge occasionally.”

“In fact, in what’s known as “rosy prospection,” anticipation of happiness is sometimes greater than the happiness actually experienced.”

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”

“There is only love.”

“Enthusiasm is more important than innate ability, it turns out, because the single more important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice.”

“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.”

“Money. It's a good servant but a bad master.”

“Look for happiness under your own roof.”

“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.”

“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”

“Forbearance is a form of generosity.”