George Eliot on positivity

“Wear a smile and make friends; wear a scowl and make wrinkles.  What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?”

Read my new book Achieve-Your-Potential-Positive-Psychology

http://blog.timlebon.com/2014/06/new-book-achieve-your-potential-with.html

Receive my free newsletter Wise Living

http://timlebon.us4.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=00293541ef59ec31e52f0c94c&id=a2871ec6bc

Michael Fordyce on the value of knowing about happiness

I don’t think anyone would question the fact that if you were going to hire an engineer to build a bridge for you, you would hope that he was up to date on all engineering factors and formulas and therein so on and so forth and the more knowledge he had about his craft or his skill, the better the eventual his bridge would be. In every area of life, we take that as just a basic gut assumption; that the more information you have the better decision you make, the better bridge you can build, the better building you can create or whatever.

Happiness is apparently no different. The more you know about it, the better able you are to find it.

https://happyecho.com/fundamental-fourteen-valhap-the-secret-fundamental/

--

Read my new book Achieve-Your-Potential-Positive-Psychology

http://blog.timlebon.com/2014/06/new-book-achieve-your-potential-with.html

Receive my free newsletter Wise Living

http://timlebon.us4.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=00293541ef59ec31e52f0c94c&id=a2871ec6bc

Psychologist David M. Clark on the best way to think about theories

"We think of theories as rather like bedtime stories: they may be true or they may not be. Mostly they are not, it turns out. So the first thing you have to do with a theory is test it; see if you can get any good evidence for it."


David. M Clark
Gresham College Lecture 2006
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/social-anxiety-and-its-treatment
(retrieved 25/08/2014)

George Eliot on the other side of empathy

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Read my new book Achieve-Your-Potential-Positive-Psychology

http://blog.timlebon.com/2014/06/new-book-achieve-your-potential-with.html

Receive my free newsletter Wise Living

http://timlebon.us4.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=00293541ef59ec31e52f0c94c&id=a2871ec6bc

Pascal's thoughts about inactivity

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, withoutpassions, without business, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his weakness,his emptiness. 

(Pascal, The Pensees, 1660/1950, p. 57).              

David Brent on the Meaning of Life

I never thought I would quote David Brent approvingly on these pages, but here goes.

A philosopher once wrote you need three things to have a good life. One, a meaningful relationship, two, a decent job of work, and three, to make a difference. And it was always that third one that stressed me, to make a difference. And I realize that I do. Every day, we all do. It's how we interact, with our fellow man."

Not sure who the philosopher was, but Freud is attributed as saying  that mental health means the ability "to love and to work"  

(from The UK version of The Office starring Ricky Gervais)

David Hume on how to stop overthinking

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

From David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature

William Glasser's key question

'What are you going to do about your life, beginning today?' "

Glasser was the creator of Reality Therapy -he died aged 88 in Sept 2013

See http://nyti.ms/14kTrxn

Zig Ziglar on the importance of goals

 People don't tend to wander around and then suddenly find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.  Zig Ziglar (motivational speaker)

Psychologist David Lykken on how we can change our happiness level

 If we let our personal genetic steersman have his way, we shall tend to follow a course laid down for us in our DNA. But if much of what is inherited consists of behaviour tendencies that can be resisted, modified and shaped, there is a real possibility for intervention, for countermanding the genetic steersman.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/149473.article

Particularly interesting as Lykken (and Tellegen) are often quoted as saying

 "trying to be happier [may be] as futile as trying to be taller"

(Lykken D, Tellegen A. Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science. 1996;7:186–189.)

Robert Louis Stevenson oh happiness

 "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world." — Robert Louis Stevenson

Huxley's Brave New World and Happiness: the controller versus the savage

."Isn't there something in living dangerously?"

"There's a great deal in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."

"What?" questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

"It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory."

"V.P.S.?"

"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."

"But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.