In the Long Run
If you wish to be happy for one hour, get intoxicated. If you wish to be happy for three days, get married. If you wish to be happy for eight days, kill your pig and eat it. If you wish to be happy forever, learn to fish. –Chinese proverb
Limits
A man had just has his annual physical exam and was waiting for the doctor’s initial report. After a few minutes, the doctor came in with his charts in his hand and said: “There’s no reason why you can’t live a completely normal life as long as you don’t try to enjoy it.”
Soft and Gentle
Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. –Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Three Essentials
The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, someone to love, and something to hope. –Joseph Addison
Choosing Happiness
It’s so important to know you can choose to feel good. Most people don’t think they have that choice. –Neil Simon
Indirect Joy
How happy are the pessimists! What joy is theirs when they have proved there is no joy. –Marie Ebner-Eschenbach
A Smile
A smile costs nothing, but gives much. It enriches those who receive, without making poorer those who give. It takes but a moment, but the memory of it sometimes lasts forever. None is so rich or mighty that they can get along without it, and none is so poor but that they can be made rich by it. A smile creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in business, and is the countersign of friendship. It brings rest to the weary, cheer to the discouraged, sunshine to the sad, and it is nature’s best antidote for trouble. Yet it cannot be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, for it is something that is of no value to anyone until it is given away. Some people are too tired to give you a smile. Give them one of yours, as none needs a smile so much as the one who has no more to give.
Shared Joy
A sorrow shared is half the sorrow, while a joy shared is twice the joy.
Strategy for Happiness
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them. –John Stuart Mill
Learning to Let Go
The joy is not always in getting what we want but in letting go of what we don’t need.
Tragedy to Triumph
Dr. Viktor Frankl, author of the book Man’s Search for Meaning, was imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II because he was a Jew. His wife, his children, and his parents were all killed in the holocaust.
The Gestapo made him strip. He stood there totally naked. As they cut away his wedding band, Viktor said to himself, “You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me—and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!” Even under the most difficult of circumstances, happiness is a choice which transforms our tragedies into triumph.
Learning It Early
The art of happiness, like that of bicycling, should be learned as early as possible. The balance, the unconscious poise, the effortless adjustment, do not come naturally to those who have never known them in childhood. –Margaret Kennedy
Realistic Happiness
Who could speak more realistically about the illusion of a yuppie value system than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who suffered deprivation of all that money can buy. In “The Prison Chronicle” he says, as few of us can, “Don’t be afraid of misfortune and do not yearn after happiness. It is, after all, all the same. The bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if hunger and thirst don’t claw at your sides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms work, if both eyes can see, and if both ears can hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart and prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well.”
C.S. Lewis on Joy
Happiness is never in our power and pleasure is. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted joy would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasure in the world.
Dr. George Burns
If you were to go around asking people what would make them happier, you’d get answers like a new car, a bigger house, a raise in pay, winning a lottery, a face-lift, more kids, less kids, a new restaurant to go to—probably not one in a hundred would say a chance to help people. And yet that may bring the most happiness of all.
I don’t know Dr. Jonas Salk, but after what he’s done for us with his polio vaccine, if he isn’t happy, he should have that brilliant head of his examined. Of course, not all of us can do what he did. I know I can’t do what he did; he beat me to it.
But the point is, it doesn’t have to be anything that extraordinary. It can be working for a worthy cause, performing a needed service, or just doing something that helps another person.
Good Days
An older member of our parish taught me a beautiful lesson one day when I casually wished him a good day. He remarked, “They’re all good days. It’s what we put in them that changes them.” In Genesis 1, we read that as God made the world day by day, He pronounced that creation process good—day by day.
Full Life
If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day. –W. Beran Wolfe
A Simple Formula
You should do something every day to make other people happy, even if it’s only to leave them alone.
Helen Keller on Happiness
Many persons have a wrong idea about what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratifications, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
The Light of Happiness
Happiness has no reason. It is not to be found in the facts of our lives, but in the color of the light by which we look at the facts.
Who Is Happy?
An English newspaper asked this question: “Who are the happiest people on earth?” These were the four prize-winning answers:
- a craftsman or artist whistling over a job well done,
- a little child building sand castles,
- a mother, after a busy day, bathing her baby,
- a doctor who has finished a difficult and dangerous operation, and saved a human life.
No millionaires among these, one notices. No kings or emperors. Riches and rand, no matter how the world strives for them, do not make happy lives.
Prescription for Unhappiness
- Make little things bother you; don’t just let them, make them!
- Lose your perspective of things, and keep it lost. Don’t put first things first.
- Get yourself a good worry—one about which you cannot do anything but worry.
- Be a perfectionist: condemn yourself and others for not achieving perfection.
- Be right, always right, perfectly right all the time. Be the only one who is right, and be rigid about your rightness.
- Don’t trust or believe people, or accept them at anything but their worst and weakest. Be suspicious. Impute ulterior motives to them.
- Always compare yourself unfavorably to others, which is the guarantee of instant misery.
- Take personally, with a chip on your shoulder, everything that happens to you that you don’t like.
- Don’t give yourself wholeheartedly or enthusiastically to anyone or to anything.
- Make happiness the aim of your life instead of bracing for life’s barbs through a “bitter with the sweet” philosophy.
Use this prescription regularly for awhile and you will be guaranteed unhappiness.
Top of the Line
The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. –Victor Hugo
Short but Sweet
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. –Robert Frost.
Goethe’s View
Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though t’were his own. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Finding Joy
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. –Agnes Repplier
The Source of Happiness
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers’ gardens. –Douglas Jerrold
On a Roadside Sign
The road to happiness is always under construction.
Divided Joy
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy, we must have somebody to divide it with. –Mark Twain
It Follows
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. –J.M. Barrie
Sacrificial Love and Hedonism
Jesus said: “If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” A few years ago, college president William Banowski interviewed Hugh Hefner. He wrote of this encounter:
I was made keenly aware of the universal appeal of Jesus during one of my conversations with Hugh Hefner in Chicago. As we talked, Mr. Hefner surprised me by saying, “If Christ were here today and had to choose between being on the staff of one of the joy-killing, pleasure-denying churches, He would, of course, immediately join us.” What most offended Jesus’ contemporaries, and what modern men find even harder to accept, is His insistence that to find life, we must first lose it. Hugh Hefner writes: “We reject any philosophy which holds that a man must deny himself for others.” The playboy cult holds that every man ought to love himself preeminently and pursue his own pleasure constantly. Nowhere is the clash between popular playboyism and the ethical realism of Jesus any sharper than over how the good life is to be achieved. Hugh Hefner tells us to get all we can. Jesus tells us to give all we can. Because the clash is total, there is no way to gloss over it. The popular philosophy teaches that to get life you must grab it; Jesus taught that to win we must surrender. The conflict is absolute and irrevocable.
The Alternatives
Some pursue happiness, others create it.
The Philosophical Approach to Tail Chasing
A big dog saw a little dog chasing its tail and asked, “Why are you chasing your tail so?” Said the puppy, “I have mastered philosophy; I have solved the problems of the universe which no dog before me has rightly solved; I have learned that the best thing for a dog is happiness, and that happiness is my tail. Therefore I am chasing it; and when I catch it, I shall have happiness.”
Said the old dog, “My son, I, too, have paid attention to the problems of the universe in my weak way, and I have formed some opinions. I, too, have judged that happiness is a fine thing for a dog, and that happiness is in my tail. But I have noticed that when I chase after it, it keeps running away from me, but when I go about my business, it comes after me.” –C.I. James
The Trial
One is never more on trial than in the moment of excessive good fortune. –Lew Wallace
Who Helps the Helper?
The story is told of a young man who came to a renowned doctor in Paris complaining of depression. He asked what he could do to get well. The doctor thought of a well-known young man named Grimaldi, a leader of a cafe society who cut a wide and lighthearted swath through Paris nightlife. The doctor told the young man, “Introduce yourself to Grimaldi. Let him show you how to enjoy yourself and you will get well.” The downcast young patient looked up with a sardonic smile and said, “I am Grimaldi.” –Lance Webb
Feeling through Others
Helen Keller was deaf and blind from an incurable childhood disease. Anne Sullivan taught her to read through her senses of touch, smell, and taste. At the end of her autobiography, Helen Keller says:
“Fate—silent, pitiless—bars the way. Fain would I question his imperious decree; for my heart is undisciplined and passionate, but my tongue will not utter the bitter, futile words that rise to my lips, and they fall back into my heart like unshed tears. Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, ‘There is joy in self-forgetfulness.’ So I try to make the light in other people’s eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”
True Joy
This is the true joy in life: being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. –George Bernard Shaw
Babe Zaharias on Happiness
George Zaharias, the husband of the great golfer Babe Didrikson Zaharias, once told Bob Richards this story:
Babe was dying of cancer, and he stood by her bed, crying like a baby. She said, ‘Now, honey, don’t take on so. While I’ve been in the hospital, I have learned one thing. A moment of happiness is a lifetime, and I have had a lot of happiness. I have a lot of it.’”
Richards wrote about this later, in his book Heart of a Champion: “That’s courage, to stress the quality of life rather than just the quantity, to meet life’s greatest tragedy with a smile. That’s what makes courage.”
The Watch Ticks On
Many years ago, a little boy was given a priceless possession: his deceased grandfather’s gold pocket watch. How he treasured it! But one day, while playing at his father’s ice plant, he lost the watch amid all the ice and sawdust.
He searched and scratched, becoming frantic, but no watch. Then he suddenly realized what to do. He stopped scurrying around and became very still. In the silence, he heard the watch ticking.
God has given each of us a priceless gift of joy in Jesus. How easy it is to lose our joy in the scurrying around of life. Yet it is always there to find, if we will but pause and listen to the beautiful presence of Jesus in our hearts.