QUOTES ABOUT HAPPINESS

We’d come home drunk and lie in bed, I’d ask what was on his mind since something always was. He’d ignore it until I grabbed his hands and pinned him down. He didn’t think I loved him because I always wrote about my ex-boyfriend. Truth is, I did and I do love him. But it just doesn’t come when you’re happy.

How does one attain happiness?'

'By learning to be content with whatever one gets.'

'Then can’t one ever desire anything?'

'Yes, one can,' said the Master, 'provided one has the attitude of an anxious father I once met in a delivery ward. When the nurse said, 'I know you were hoping to get a boy, but it’s a baby girl,' the man replied, 'Oh! It doesn’t matter really, because I was hoping that it would be a girl if it wasn’t a boy.

Centralisation is mainly an idea of order; decentralisation, one of freedom. . . . Order requires intelligence and is conducive to efficiency; while freedom calls for. and opens the door to, intuition and leads to innovation.

The larger an organisation, the more obvious and inescapable is the need for order. But if this need is looked after with such efficiency and perfection that no scope remains for man to exercise his creative intuition, for entrepreneurial disorder, the organisation becomes moribund and a desert of frustration.

In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as the word ‘uneconomic’. If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul- destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.

She would have been happy living all her life in her country. There was an alegría inherent to Colombians, optimism even through tears, but never the kind of self-interrogation of “happiness” she observed in the north, the way people constantly asked themselves if they were content as if it were their main occupation in life. And what was happiness? Not selfish fulfillment, of this she was certain. That seemed like a recipe for the opposite.