#happines

Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water, using the word lightly, but denying the hard policies it implies. Labour shies away from it, but should take up the challenge. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#anyone #away #cameron #challenge #david

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy. ↗

— Polly Toynbee

#activity #asking #brain #degrees #electrical

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#disposition #happiness #knowledge #light-disposition #art

I was so happy it was like a food, like I'd been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know, fully, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: "Imagine—imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this," and in the middle of the singing, I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing—an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was. ↗

— Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs

#the-nature-of-happiness #food

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#growth #happiness #happy #neither #nor

I've gotten to a point, where I realize that happiness doesn't come from the outside. ↗

— Ricky Williams

#gotten #happiness #i #outside #point

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#book #falling #fly #flying #freedom

A smile is happiness you'll find right under your nose. ↗

— Tom Wilson

#find #happiness #nose #right #under

Happiness doesn't depend on how much you have to enjoy, but how much you enjoy what you have. ↗

— Tom Wilson

#enjoy #happiness #how #much #you

(about William Blake) As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me." And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy." ...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#creativity #effort #freedom #glory #happiness