On Happiness
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Tibetian Buddhist monk and teacher:
“Those who seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, glory, power, and heroics are as naive as the child who tries to catch a rainbow and wear it as a coat.”
Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, French mystery novelist:
“Pleasure is the happiness of madmen, while happiness is the pleasure of sages.”
Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, geneticists and human diversity experts:
“Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves.”
Tibetan proverb:
“Seeking happiness outside ourselves is like waiting for sunshine in a cave facing north.”
From F.M. Alexander’s CONSTRUCTIVE CONSCIOUS CONTROL OF THE INDIVIDUAL:
“…the lack of real happiness manifested by the majority of adults today is…that they are experiencing, not an improving, but a continually deteriorating use of their psycho-physical selves….[M]alconditions increase day by day and week by week, and foster that unsatisfactory psycho-physical state which we call ‘unhapiness’…Increasing awareness [of how one is using one's body in life] makes more and more for successful accomplishment in accordance with reason and satisfactory means…and connotes a continuous process which introduces a special interest and pleasure into the most ordinary acts of life.”