It takes as much time to be happy as it does to be depressed or resentful.
Happiness requires no extra time. In fact, it requires no time at all. As I’ve already stated, happiness waits on welcome, not on time.
— Robert Holden, PhD, Happiness Now! p. 91
Merely making our relationships last is just not good enough. Our relationships can change us. Our relationships should change us. Our relationships will change us for the better — if we are willing to take the risk.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 199
Fantasy instead teaches us that there is something worthwhile you can do on the way to the grave: you can dream. And that maybe that dreaming is not only intrinsically valuable, for its own sake, but that sometimes the dream can take on a life of its own, a life that persists, and that shapes and sometimes even ennobles the lives of others that it touches, sometimes long after the original dreamer is gone from this earth.
— Gardner Dozois, Preface, Modern Classics of Fantasy
The right two people can be better together than alone, helping to keep each other sane, well-loved, and secure. Nevertheless, here’s where we’ve got it backward. A loving relationship can never make us whole. Rather, it allows us to better experience our own wholeness. Only from this perspective can we realize ourselves emotionally.
— Judith Orloff, MD, Emotional Freedom, p. 207
It is easy to buy a book; what is more difficult is to purchase the time in which to read them. Too often the mere fact of possession tempts us to think we own the contents.
— Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), quoted in The Book Lover: Quotable Quotes, Magpie Books, London, p. 26
Growing older involves accumulating life experience in a way that allows us to know ourselves, and the world around us, generously, hopefully, and with a minimum of denial. If reality is to bring us meaning rather than despair, however, we need to learn to soften life’s hard edges with hope rather than illusion. Which means that we need to learn how to play….
When we engage each other in real and playful ways, we touch those places that have been most injured, and are therefore most closed to growth, with love, kindness, and compassion. We bring our deepest fears into creative contact with each other. In ways that are at once real and not real, that simultaneously embody both past and present, play, once again, invites seemingly immutable aspects of our histories into the present, and so enlivens parts of ourselves that have become deadened, lightens parts that have become too heavy to carry, and teaches us to live with pains that have all too often become too great to bear.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 171, 185
The perception that happiness is a decision affirms that attitude is first, circumstance is second. It teaches you that whatever is happening, you always carry the deciding vote when it comes to happiness, success, love, and peace of mind. Sometimes this is easy to remember; other times it’s not so easy. Once again, it’s when you forget that you must ask for help.
— Robert Holden, PhD, Happiness Now! p. 54
Our experience of abundance is determined far more by our inner state than by our outer circumstances. The point of leverage for changing our circumstances is how we meet what happens to us, not changing the details of what’s happening. We humans are meaning-makers — we decide what something means to us. Out of our assigned meaning grow all our choices and actions. And the meaning we assign is entirely based on our inner state.
— Victoria Castle, The Trance of Scarcity, p. 178
Sometimes we have to give ourselves space to grieve what we have lost: a person, a way of life, a dream. But at some point we have to stand up and say, this is my new life and in this life I need a new job.
— Elizabeth Edwards, Resilience, p. 35
Not forgiving ourselves, not forgiving others, not forgiving, even when the whole world thinks we should, is a part of who we are. It is as natural to us as our defenses, our repression, our dissociation, our denial. No one is able to look at himself whole. No one is so evolved as to deal creatively with every loss and insult. No one is free from illusions about himself, positive and negative. No one is immune to the joys of victimhood and revenge. We all have this in us. We are all enmeshed to some degree in our inner dramas and the unimaginable passions and loyalties they represent, which hold sway over us in ways that not even we can know. If we can see some of this in ourselves, accept it, be concerned about it, talk about it, it is less likely to control or overwhelm us. We will have a better chance to stay connected, to expand our zone of connection, to dissolve whatever scar tissue we can from a life of hurt and conflict, and move on to the goodness of love.
— Robert Karen, PhD, The Forgiving Self, p. 279