09 Oct Some thoughts on happiness from Gimundo
Once again, the guys over at Gimundo.com have published some inspiring words and this time, their focus is specifically on happiness. So please enjoy they’re happiness posting below and if you want to receive their Good News Daily simply go to the website and sign up for their free mailings…I can guarantee it will bring you happiness!
More Thoughts on Happiness
10/8/2007
Gimundo.com
A while back, we rounded up some fantastic quotes on happiness (if you haven’t seen them yet, check them out here).
We loved those so much that we decided it was about time we dug up some more to share with you. Enjoy!
According to African-American writer and civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, “The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for – and dying for, if need be – is the opportunity of making someone else more happy and more useful.”
Great advice from beloved novelist, Jane Austen: “Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.”
Here’s a conflicted quote that makes perversely perfect sense, from writer/director Woody Allen: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
Writer Iris Murdoch once said, “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” So if you’re feeling down, you might just want to visit a garden.
Looking for inspiration? If you’ve got kids, it’s right in front of you, said writer/philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.”
“If I feel unhappy, I do mathematics to become happy. If I am happy, I do mathematics to keep happy,” mathematician Alfred Renyi said. Okay, so his method wouldn’t be our first choice – but the message is simple: Do what you love.
This wonderful quote from the blind and deaf writer, Helen Keller, shows that you don’t need all your senses to feel inspired by the world around you: “What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!”
Finally, we’ll finish off with one of our favorite poems by Emily Dickinson.
Hope is the Thing with Feathers
“Hope” is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops-at all-
And sweetest-in the Gale-is heard-
And sore must be the storm-
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm-
I’ve heard it in the chillest land-
And on the strangest Sea-
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb-Of Me.