Happiness For Beginners Quotes

Getting what you want doesn't make you happy... Having doesn't make you happy: appreciating does; Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.

The things we remember are what we hold on to. And what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.

It's my battle cry: Appreciate Everything!

But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives. We only get one story. And I am determined to make mine a good one.

The most important thing to remember is that getting what you want doesn’t make you happy. Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge. But some of these rules and discipline are good for beginners.

I gave you Jake because you’re headstrong and accident prone, and he’s our medic and I trust him to patch you up. I gave you Jake because you’re the best map reader we’ve got, and he’s damn near blind. And I gave you Jake because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.

It’s sadness that gives happiness its meaning.

Well, for example, happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.

Be humble: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

I guess who you are always seems normal to you because you don’t know what it feels like to be anyone else.

I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have.

I just wanted to be good at this. And competent. And tough. And, ultimately, just: anybody but me. I was tired of being a disaster. I was tired of being a trampled-on flower. I wanted to be awesome. That wasn't too much, was it?

Here. Here is simple and happy. That's what I meant to give you.

I don’t think trying to be happy means you can never be sad,” I said. “Right?

Even just trying, I decided, could be an act of bravery in itself.

You can’t understand this yet, but that’s most of life: breaking your own promises to yourself.

Congratulate yourself as a good beginner. Feel proud of God for choosing you to begin the work at hand. Accept the work freely and get started. Be grateful.

Because you absolutely never believe in yourself—and he finds a way to believe in you every damn day.

The things you think about determine the things you think about”—meaning the more you focus on something, the more likely your brain is to focus on it.

Happiness is more about appreciation than acquisition.

It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

But the things we remember are what we hold on to, and what we hold on to becomes the story of our lives.

Love is always a disaster, darling. That’s what makes it fun.

After all, life will hand each one of us our fair share of despair and loss and suffering—and then some. That’s certain. But just as certain: It will also give us slices of chocolate cake, and sunny, seventy-two-degree days, and breezes that rustle the trees. Good things are so easy to overlook, but that doesn’t make them any less there.

I'd saturate my brain with such an overabundance of gratitude for every little joy around me that I wouldn't have any room for envy, or loneliness, or sorrow...I'd be too insulated by happiness to even care.

Just remember that money cannot buy you happiness (although it might make misery more tolerable).

Longing for you gave me something to hope for. Even when it was hopeless.

The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you're there you're not happy anyway, you want to be some place else. It's always for 'when I retire,' 'when I graduate college,' 'when I make enough money,' 'when I get married,' 'when I get divorced,' 'when the kids move out.' It's like, wait a minute, this is it. This is your life. We only have moments. This moment's as good as any other. It's perfect.

Only do not forget, if I wake up crying, it’s only because in my dream I’m a lost child, hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.

It just seems to me there’s enough pain in the world—and not nearly enough pleasure. I guess once you’ve had enough kidney stones, hot candle wax on the nipples seems less appealing.

The mind is just like a muscle - the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.” -Idowu Koyenikan

You never know what you really believe until you have to defend it.

To experience every situation as new and miraculous, you have to focus on your senses instead of focusing on the sense objects.

It’s my battle cry: Appreciate Everything.

The problem is that you THINK that you have to be motivated to do something, instead of just doing it and then having it done. Tip: The willingness to do things comes with action. Don’t wait until you feel like going to the gym and exercising. Start exercising right away and there’s a huge possibility that you’ll feel the desire to continue.

Whales have a highly evolved language that works like sonar. They have special neurons called spindle cells. Human have them, too, and they’re linked with self-awareness, and compassion, and language. Except whales have had them about fifteen million years longer than we have.

The lived on the mistaken assumption that their lives mattered, that life was essentially fair, that it was all going to wind up happy in the end. I knew what they didn’t—that everything you care about will disappear, that deserving a happy life doesn’t mean you can get one, and that there really is no one in the entire world you can count on but yourself.

Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world.

We cannot learn if we are stuck in our mind’s conditioned way of thinking. We must be open to discovering the Truth, whatever it may turn out to be. This requires a state of openness, curiosity, and sincerity, a state of pure awareness, a state of observing reality without jumping to conclusions about what reality is. This state of direct experience is known in Zen as “beginner’s mind,” and it is essential to embody this state when we want to understand our experience.

Life is a binary system. Things work out or they don't, worry doesn't add much, and the only way to influence the process is simply not giving up.

Everyone wants to be happy, no one wants to suffer – remember this always.

I’m committed to never listening to anybody when it comes to my own path and happiness.

Clear perception requires emotional distance. It's hard to be wise while you're still squirming.

The 'what' of life is immediate, but the 'why' trails along at its own pace.

This was a moment in time that was already lost.

Our good fortunes allowed us to feel a sadness our parents didn't have time for, and a happiness that I never saw with them.

[N]ot getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have.

I wondered if stating a preference to the universe just dared it to mess with me.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”  – The Buddha

I had finally come to understand that not getting what you want is actually the trick to it all. Because not getting what you want forces you to appreciate what you already have. I finally got that if you were always in a state of longing you could never truly get satisfied,

We all say we hate being misunderstood and how we desperately want to find people who understand us. But it is not lack of compatible people that keeps us lonely. There is no shortage of people on your journey. The real, secret obstacle that we have against finding authentic, genuine relationships with people is our subconscious fear of growth. If we stick around in the bin of broken toys playing the queen or the king, at least we get to feel some sense of accomplishment at being the most evolved person we know. To find our tribe means finding people we can learn from, people who are better at some things than we are, people who have something to teach. We say we want it, but how many of us fear being a beginner more than loneliness and much more than being in the wrong crowd? There is a strange comfort, a sense of safety, to suffering and loneliness. To be happy, to find our family, we must be willing to let that go.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.

He realized in an instant that all the philosophers he had read, all the religions, even Einstein, even J. Krishnamurti, were saying the same thing in different ways - there is a shocking truth hiding behind the world that we see, behind the ordinary days of our lives. God is not a lie, but some kind of an abridged version of this reality, a beginner's course that has been misunderstood.

When you have Chick Night to look forward to, it can be your light at the end of a long and trying month. It can help you maintain your balance, keep your perspective, and hold on to your sanity during times when you're actually afraid to wonder what else could go wrong.

When was the last time you went out for an adults-only evening with one or more of your women friends? If you can’t answer that question without checking the calendar on the wall in your kitchen, flipping through the daytimer on your desk or calling up your computerized calendar, Chick Night™ is a concept that is long overdue.

that there really is no one in the entire world you can count on but yourself.

The most important thing to remember is that getting what you want doesn’t make you happy.

flash summer shower.

Sometimes anybody really isn’t better than nobody

The beginning of the spiritual journey is what I call "life after awakening.

I am happiest when I clear my mind and allow the world around me to reteach me what I thought I already knew.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama

enough

Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).

Disconnect your behavior from your emotional life. That’s what Zen teaches us.

All of these things that we have been looking for in other places have been available all along, closer than we thought.

Honestly realize and accept the fact that everything is not within your control.

Kyanite is used to align all seven chakras automatically. When the chakras are blocked, it can be used to open them.

Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power.

Karma is the energy created by every action performed– both good and bad. Every action, thought, work, deed, word and idea creates energy that affects our other actions.

If you’re not 100% committed to what you do (even if it’s just your chore which you have to do), then why do anything at all?

If you don’t take things personally, you can’t even complain.

Also, stop correcting people all the time, preaching to them and commenting on all the subjects you have no idea about.

De-clutter your life by getting rid of unnecessary commitments.

She has the kind of hair that should ensure its owner’s perfect lifetime happiness.

Well, children can’t see their parents clearly until they grow up.

I finally got that if you were always in a state of longing you could never truly get satisfied,

The leaders of wolf packs may be the most aggressive and dominant, but the leaders of dog packs are invariably the dogs with the most friends.

Be humble: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” —Shunryu Suzuki

I’d saved her, but she’d saved me right back.

Was I lost? Not technically. But I had lost something that I couldn’t even articulate—and I’d gone far too long without finding it.

But Beckett, for all his posturing, talked in scribbles. He gave lines of information with gaping spaces in between.

She has the kind of hair that should ensure its owner’s perfect lifetime happiness. Too bad her hair is not in charge of negotiating her love life, because then nothing would ever go wrong.

Buddha himself said “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

would certainly never come back—but not because I’d never want to. Only because that’s how life is. It moves too fast—faster and faster the older you get, no matter how much you’d like to slow it down.

When Buddha spoke about suffering, he meant that we have unsatisfactory experiences. Even the happiness we have does not last forever, and that situation is unsatisfactory. The causes of our problems lie not in the external environment and those inhabiting it, but in our own mind. The disturbing attitudes and negative emotions, such as clinging attachment, anger, and ignorance are the real source of our unhappiness.

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control could resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can. The second enemy is frustration—the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leaves a man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you knew how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say "No time for that," "Too late now," and "Not for me." But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God's hands. We may as well, for God will certainly retain it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment "as to the Lord." It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

We’ve forgotten that chasing happiness or peace only causes it to seem further away. It’s a little like wild kittens. You can chase them all day long and not catch them. But, if you sit quietly and allow them to come to you, you will tame them in time.

Desire persuades us that if only we have a pleasant breath or if only we have that spacious feeling we had earlier, then we would be happy. But desire is insatiable. As soon as we get the object or experience we have been longing for, we move on to another desire, because the more we pursue desire, the more desire we experience.

If we frame a situation in terms of 'us versus them,' and claim our side is right because we care for the general welfare of society, while theirs is wrong, then our motivation is almost identical to theirs!...We must try to develop compassion for all parties involved in a conflict because each of them wishes to be happy and to avoid problems.

As we followed, she listed all the dishes Auntie Tina had ordered: crispy eel in sweet sauce, smoked duck two ways, hand-pulled noodles with crab roe- "luckily we had enough pregnant crabs on hand!"- and others I could not decipher from their poetic yet opaque Chinese names: squirrel-shaped Mandarin fish, eight treasure rice, four happiness pork.

When we feel a deep sense of gratitude toward ourselves, appreciating our good nature, and showing ourselves love, self-worth and self-compassion, we are more capable of meeting life's challenges with success and grace, thus minimizing anxiety, worry and depression. There's simply no chance of enjoying life without first generating self-compassion.

When psychotherapists studying the art of achievement analyzed the language and thought patterns of the most successful people, they discovered a very interesting thing.  Those people never talked about having to do something - they talked about making certain choices, because even if someone puts a gun to your head, you still do have a choice. It can be a crappy choice, but you have it. In this case you can either do what they tell you to do or you can ignore them.

...the beginner, satisfied with the happy state of the beginner, able to travel from his place at the window, never losing sight of the fact that he is content with the comfortable grayness of his modest knowledge. In short: let others advance. Or, as Malamud would say: perhaps it would be more useful to settle into the stubbornly modest gray classroom and accept it as it is, like an eternal Monday in nursery school. After all, we don't know if things aren't better that way: deliberately insufficient.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who has been called the “world’s calmest man,” has spent a lifetime exploring how to live in kairos, albeit by a different name. He has taught it as mindfulness or maintaining “beginner’s mind.” He has written: “Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.”2 This focus on being in the moment affects the way he does everything. He takes a full hour to drink a cup of tea with the other monks every day. He explains: “Suppose you are drinking a cup of tea. When you hold your cup, you may like to breathe in, to bring your mind back to your body, and you become fully present. And when you are truly there, something else is also there—life, represented by the cup of tea. In that moment you are real, and the cup of tea is real. You are not lost in the past, in the future, in your projects, in your worries. You are free from all of these afflictions. And in that state of being free, you enjoy your tea. That is the moment of happiness, and of peace.” Pay attention through the day for your own kairos moments. Write them down in your journal. Think about what triggered that moment and what brought you out of it. Now that you know what triggers the moment, try to re-create it. Training yourself to tune into kairos will not only enable you to achieve a higher level of contribution but also make you happier.

Right mindfulness is about paying attention, whether we’re meditating or just going about our daily tasks. Being mindful helps us stay anchored in the present moment, which keeps us in touch with reality as it is. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes mindfulness like this: “When you have a toothache, the feeling is very unpleasant, and when you do not have a toothache, you usually have a neutral feeling. However, if you can be mindful of the non-toothache, the non-toothache will become a feeling of peace and joy. Mindfulness gives rise to and nourishes happiness.” In this sense, mindfulness helps us become aware that at any given moment, we are capable of experiencing contentment. It’s just a matter of increasing our sphere of awareness to notice all the “non-toothaches” we’re currently experiencing.

Anne Robertson, a Methodist pastor, writer, and executive director of the Massachusetts Bible Society, explains how the Greek origins of the words happiness and joy hold important meaning for us today. She explains that the Greek word for happiness is Makarios, which was used to describe the freedom of the rich from normal cares and worries, or to describe a person who received some form of good fortune, such as money or health. Robertson compares this to the Greek word for joy which is chairo. Chairo was described by the ancient Greeks as the “culmination of being” and the “good mood of the soul.” Robertson writes, “Chairo is something, the ancient Greeks tell us, that is found only in God and comes with virtue and wisdom. It isn’t a beginner’s virtue; it comes as the culmination. They say its opposite is not sadness, but fear.”1

I do, however, hold a certain degree of doubt about the how, if, when, where, and who of it all. Creative doubt keeps me with a perpetual “beginner's mind,” which is a wonderful way to keep growing, keep humble, and keep living in happy wonder. Yet it is this very quiet inner unfolding of things that seems to create the most doubt and anxiety for many believers. They seem to prefer a “touch of the magic wand” kind of God (Tinker Bell?) to a God who works secretly and humbly, and who includes us in on the process and the conclusion. This is the only way I can understand why a Christian would think evolution is any kind of faith problem whatsoever. The only price we pay for living in the Big Picture is to hold a bit of doubt and anxiety about the exact how, if, when, where, and who of it all, but never the that. Unfortunately, most Christians are not well trained in holding opposites for very long, or living

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.