He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

I’m very picky; I’m never happy with anything. It’s so hard to give the record away and accept that you’re done.

Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.

That’s one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don’t have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

I go to sleep thinking about my kids being spoiled and I wake up thinking about it.

Contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people’s happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

I won’t be happy until we have every boy in America between the ages of six and sixteen wearing a glove and swinging a bat.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

I’ve run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people’s support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

I’m the kind of person who needs to feel like everything happens for a reason. When you date a guy and it goes badly, that’s horrible. But if you can write a song about it, then it was worth it.

Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it’s only us. And we’re only responsible to make ourselves happy.

In the spring of 1936, I was introduced by friends to Jean Tatlock. In the autumn, I began to court her. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.

I’m just a friendly person; that runs in my family.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Losers are people who are afraid of losing.

I was a very shy character, always feeling uncomfortable because everybody was stronger than I, and always afraid I would look like a sissy. Everybody else played baseball; everybody else did all kinds of athletic things.

If I get married, I want to be very married.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s inviting disaster.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

When befriended, remember it; when you befriend, forget it.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

I’m happiest with my family around me.

Sucking up to the biggies won’t get us anywhere.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.