Hand-picked quotes about happiness from the best non-fiction books

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase.

If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.

It’s a daily struggle against instincts to extend your peacock feathers to their outermost limits and keep up with others doing the same.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.

The odds of picking a job when you’re not old enough to drink that you will still enjoy when you’re old enough to qualify for Social Security are low.

There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.

Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished. And since controlling your time is such a key happiness influencer, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t feel much happier even though we are, on average, richer than ever.

Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.

Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, has an infinite ROI.

The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

The three components of happiness are: * something to do * someone to love * something to look forward to

Allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin.

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.

Having more control over your time and options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.

Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities.

Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming... in other words, living.

The problem with longing for paradises is that it distracts us from our efforts to extract pleasure and meaning from the present.

Past a certain level of income, what you need is just what sits below your ego.

«People having control over their time tend to be happier in life» is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it.

You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does—especially from the people you want to respect and admire you

But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.

My own theory is that, in the real world, people do not want the mathematically optimal strategy. They want the strategy that maximizes for how well they sleep at night.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom.

The pursuit of material wealth distracts us from activities and people that provide more lasting pleasure and satisfaction.

Sunk costs—anchoring decisions to past efforts that can’t be refunded—are a devil in a world where people change over time. They make our future selves prisoners to our past, different, selves. It’s the equivalent of a stranger making major life decisions for you.