Happiness Project

Sasha Pivovarova for Club Monaco 2012

"I had everything I could possibly want - yet I was failing to appreciate it.  Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had." 

"What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner." - Colette  

"How could I let go of everyday annoyances to keep a larger, more transcendent perspective?" 

"One of my goals for the happiness project was to prepare for adversity - to develop the self-discipline and the mental habits to deal with a bad thing when it happened. The time to start exercising, stop nagging . . , was when everything was going smoothly.  I didn't want to wait for a crisis to remake my life" 

"Exercise for sanity not vanity" 

"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 have an idea of who I wish I were, and that obscures my understanding of who I actually am" 

"You've always had this desire for legitimacy, and you'll have it forever.  It's probably why you went to law school."  

"I ignored options that, no matter how enticing they might be for other people, weren't right for me." 

"Challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness" 

"People don't notice your mistakes as much as you think" 

"One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows to to expand your self-definition.  You become larger. . .  Research shows that the more elements that make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened" 

"Between the ages of 20 and 40 we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity" - W.H. Auden 

"I was confident enough to take criticism graciously and able to respond without attack or self-justification."   

"There are times in the lives of most of us when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed" - William Edward Hartpole Lecky 

"Knowing what you admire in others is a wonderful mirror into your deepest, as yet unborn, self" 

"The things that go wrong often make the best memories"

Favorite quotes from "The Happiness Project"