There can’t be any formula for happiness because happiness is an effect and not a cause. The same activity, which at one time gave you happiness, may now become a source of suffering. Or often a great suffering ends up becoming a source of joy.
Love is like a living being with a body and a soul. The soul of love is emotion while the body of love is action. Just like body and soul are integrated, emotions and actions too are integrated. You do some loving actions naturally when you feel love for a person. But, if the actions are missing, even 104 | 31 Ways to Happiness Manage Your Love | 105 though the feelings might be there, love can’t survive for long.
Every bad experience is a source of unhappiness. Yet the intensity of suffering can be controlled. Just like a person who has a million-dollar bank balance is likely to get less disturbed due to loss of a few dollars, you too can easily overcome some bad incidents in your life, without losing much joy, provided you already have a great amount of happiness in your life.
But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much misery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then. It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care.
Your conscience is not only the repository of your failures but also of your successes. It contains your vileness as also your goodness. The more good deeds you have performed in the past, the more happiness will be at your disposal all the time. You can always borrow some of that happiness when you are feeling low.
I must find myself a life, a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life. What is respect compared to this other thing: being happy and having satisfied the heart’s pride. Even being unhappy is better than being respected. I am unhappy despite the respect I enjoy; and so in my own eyes I don’t deserve this respect; for I consider only happiness worthy of respect. Therefore I must try whether it is possible to be happy without insisting on respect.
Happy people know that all the imperfections of the world are due to the conditioning of our minds which seeks perfection in the world according to the moral and statuary laws. Unless you free yourself from the binding of the rules and laws, there will hardly be any place for happiness in your life.
You that read all of this in a year that I will never see will think me wretched, perhaps... But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about. I have seen days like gold.
Instead of arguing whether happiness gives one success or success makes one happy, we may agree that happiness and success are interconnected with each other and are the cause and effect of each other. Similarly, failure and unhappiness are also cause and effect of each other.
Happiness is a state of mind, so our miseries and joy come from living in any of the three dimensions of time—past, present and future. Hence, if we wish to live happily, we must learn to remove sufferings not only from the present, but also from the past and future.
Every person who is satisfied, content and happy thinks his understanding of happiness is truest because that is what he is experiencing. So, a virtuous person would subscribe his happiness to his virtuous deeds while an evil person would subscribe his happiness to his vices. Since a corrupt person has never lived a virtuous life, he will possibly never know the euphoria one derives from doing good deeds.
Criticising and condemning others can’t give anyone lasting happiness. Once people fall into the habit of criticising others, they become susceptible to even criticising their own selves as they too are not perfect. The habit of comparing leads to the habit of criticism, which soon leads to self-condemnation, and fills your life with pain and misery.
Wealth is like food. You can’t survive in this world without wealth just like your body can’t survive without food. More wealth, however, does not mean more happiness just like more food does not mean better health.
We start feeling uneasy as soon as the initial euphoria or happiness from our achievement fades away. We then raise the bar further so that we can strive more and achieve even higher success thereby deliberately making ourselves unhappy. However, our lifelong chase of success only gives us suffering and unhappiness.
Confidence can't hide.
when you are earning money by doing what you don’t particularly like, there will be an urgent need to buy pleasure and happiness, from the acquired money to justify the pain and suffering you are going through in your work. The more is the suffering in earning the wealth, the greater is the desire of enjoying pleasure from the money so earned.
Most of us believe that wealth is the greatest source of happiness. People sacrifice everything to earn wealth with the hope that it will lead to happiness. Undoubtedly, wealth can provide us with worldly pleasures, comforts, status in the society and even fame, but it is noteworthy that our greatest source of pain is also wealth.
Our mind is working all the time with two goals in sight: first is to minimise the pain and the second is to maximise the happiness. In its attempt to achieve its twin objectives, it is always moving back and forth in the three dimensions of time so that it can heal the pain and bring happiness to the present.
Human lives are so deeply interconnected with each other that we can’t live in this world as an independent person of our own. Everyone in the world is an extension of the self. When others are suffering, we too can’t escape suffering. Our happiness depends on others and their happiness depends on us.
When you do nothing to be happy, you have no right to complain about your misery.
