We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.

Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.

Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.

Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution.

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.

As used in economics the term "capital" would be defined as follows: Capital refers to resources withheld from immediate consumption in the expectation of greater future returns. However controversial a topic this has been, capital has been the main–if not the only–way of achieving progress, even in violently anticapitalist, socialist countries. A dam, a hospital, a university, a cathedral, or a national park cannot be built without using up resources that would be easier to consume immediately, and none of them would be built at all unless they were believed to provide some greater returns in the future.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved.

Happiness is prosperity combined with virtue.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.

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Alexandra Jaye

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