Happiness

General Resources

General

• Daniel Gilbert on TED

• Meditation Exercises
• Savoring Exercises
• Gratitude Exercises
• The Movie List for Happiness

Cartoons

I've got the bowl...

Mill taught...

Researchers say...

I could cry...

I think the dosage needs adjusting...

I you can give me a raise...

They found something close to happiness...

Happiness Music

U2 - Beautiful Day

Annie DiFranco - Arrival Gate

Onelinedrawing - Livin' Small

Beatles - Happiness is a Warm Gun

Bob Marley - Could you be Loved, Redemption Song, This is Love

The Offspring - Conspiracy of One - This is One Fine Day

Phish - Farmhouse - Heavy Things

REM "Shiny, Happy People"

Johnny Cash - Satisfied Mind (from Kill Bill v.2)

Jimmy Cliff, Wonderful World, Beautiful People

Louis Armstrong, When you're smiling, (Shay, Fisher, and Goodwin)

Sheryl Crow, If It Makes you Happy

Beatles, Abbey Road, Here Comes the Sun

Jokes and Quotes

Five secrets to romantic happiness: 5 secrets to romantic happiness: 1. It is important to find a man who works around the house, cooks and cleans and who has a job. 2. It is important to find a man who makes you laugh. 3. It is important to find a man who is dependable and doesn't lie. 4. It is important to find a man who's good in bed and who loves to have sex with you. 5. It is important that these four men never meet.

We may defne happiness as prosperity combined with virtue; or as independence of life; or as the secure enjoyment of the maximum of pleasure; or as a good condition of property and body, together with the power of guarding one's property and body and making use of them. That happiness is one or more of these things pretty well everybody agrees. From this definition of happiness it follows that its constituent parts are: good birth, plenty of friends, good friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honour, good luck, and virtue. A man cannot fail to be completely independent if he possesses these internal and these external goods; for besides these there are no others to have. (Goods of the soul and of the body are internal. Good birth, friends, money, and honour are external.) Further, we think that he should possess resources and luck, in order to make his life really secure. Aristotle, Rhetoric quoted in McMahon.

"Ask yourselfwhether you are happy," Samuel Johnson wrote in his 1873 Autobiography, "and you cease to be so."

What is happiness?" asked Nietzsche. "The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome."

Rousseau "a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion."

George Burns "having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. ¨Samuel Johnson

We think that change occurs suddenly, but even I have learned better Happiness is wild and arbitrary, but it's not sudden. ¨Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces.

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. - Oscar Wilde

Happiness is good health and a bad memory. - Ingrid Bergman

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich. - Alan Alda

Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it.

It is pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness; poverty and wealth have both failed. - Kin Hubbard

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy. - Spike Milligan

Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery. - Spike Milligan

Happiness is having a scratch for every itch. - Ogden Nash

"Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies." -- Gene Hill

Happiness lives for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who tried, for only they can appreciate the importance of people who have touched their lives.

The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

Happiness comes through doors you didn't even know you left open.

May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human, enough hope to make you happy, and enough money to buy gifts!!

When one door of happiness closes, another opens but often we look so long at the closed door that we don't see the one which has been opened for us.

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. - Robert Frost

Happiness is a warm puppy. -Charles Schulz

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. - Ernest Hemingway

Happiness serves hardly any other purose than to make unhappiness possible - Marcel Proust

When one door of happines closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us - Helen Keller

Happiness is brief. I will not stay. God batters at its sails. - Euripides

Happiness ain't a thing in itself -- it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. - Mark Twain

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time. -Edith Wharton

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible. -Bertrand Russell

Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs. - Moliere

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

Happiness consists more in small conveniences of pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happne but seldom to a man in the course of his life. - Benjamin Franklin

Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content. Shakespeare - Lady Macbeth

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. P. G. Wodehouse

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Woody Allen.

Is it so small a thing,

To have enjoyed the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done?

Matthew Arnold

Humanity does not strive for happiness; only the English do. - Nietzsche

Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires, extensively, in respectof their manifoldness, intensively, in respect oftheir degree, and protensively in respect of their duration." Immanual Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, (A806/B834)

more quotes at www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_happiness.html

"As for me, then, I love life, and cultivate it. . . I do not go about wishing that it should lack the need to eat and drink, and it would seem to me no less excusable a failing to wish that need to be doubled; ... nor that we should beget children insensibly with our fingers or our heels, but, rather, with due respect, that we could also beget them voluptuously with our fingers and heels; nor that the body should be without desire and without titillation" Montaigne, Complete Essays, 855

Website about Happiness

• The Happiness Project

Major Research Questions

1. What are the significant new findings in economics and psychology regarding well-being? What are the implications, if any, of these findings?
2. What are some of the key insights on the topic of happiness of philosophical, cultural, and religious thinkers throughout human history?
3. What role does pleasure play in happiness?
4. What role does fate and luck play in happiness?
5. What role does wealth play in happiness?
6. What role does love and intimacy play in happiness?
7. To what extent can we influence our general happiness by the things we do?
8. Can you significantly alter your level of happiness? Can you change how you think, behave, and what you emphasize in life to change your level of happiness?
9. Is it true that money does not make you happy?
10. What, if any, outcomes are needed for happiness?
11. How objective, real, subjective is happiness?

Lecture Notes from the Death Class

Death and Happiness Class

Previous Course Pages

• Spring 2008 Course Readings for Happiness

• Spring 2008 Study Questions Collaboration Page

• Spring 2008 Professor's Blog - Happiness