Buy the Book! Announcing an updated edition of How We Choose to Be Happy with a new Introduction highlighting the connection between the 9 Choices and optimal health. Read more... "How do I help my patients learn to be happy? I prescribe this book!" Nicholas LaRusso, MD. Chair, Dept of Medicine, Mayo Clinic "...insightful and wise...this book includes uplifting stories of people who have learned to be happy." Fit magazine	How We Choose To Be Happy Rick Foster & Greg Hicks Leadership Development - Team Dynamics Training - Executive Coaching 4053 Harlan Street, loft 201, Emeryville, CA 94608 phone: (510) 540-1241 fax: (240) 332-8483 email: info@fosterhicks.com Quotes on Happiness In How We Choose to Be Happy we were able to rely on a wealth of philosophical, literary and religious sources to validate and reflect the thoughts and feelings expressed by extremely happy people. Happiness is also a hot subject in Pop Culture. We'd like to share some of the quotes from the book with you. Fundamental to the writing of the book was our interest in the life stories of extremely happy people. Poet and writer Muriel Rukeyser said it best: "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms." From the Introduction of How We Choose to Be Happy: "Happiness depends upon ourselves." Aristotle "To live happily is an inward power of the soul." Marcus Aurelius "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you...Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all things will be added unto you." Jesus "The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart." Buddha, from The Dhammapada "The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice." George Eliot, Daniel Deronda From Chapter 1, Intention "Those who wish to sing always find a song." Swedish proverb "The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not." Ludwig Wittgenstein "Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind." Alice Meynell "They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods." Edith Wharton "Joy has nothing to do with material things, or with man's outward circumstance...A man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched, and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy." William Barclay "Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions." Aristotle "Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation. Foolish preparation?" Jane Austen "Remember that happiness is a way of travel -- not a destination." Roy M. Goodman "It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere." Agnes Repplier From Chapter 2, Accountability "Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Let me listen to me and not to them." Gertrude Stein "Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame." Erica Jong "It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it." Sophocles, Ajax, c. 450 B.C. "Self pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in the world." Helen Keller From Chapter 3, Identification "Ordinary riches can be stolen: real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891 "I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds around my neck." Emma Goldman "Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment." Lao-tzu "See the false as false, the truth as true. Look into your own heart, follow your nature." The Dhammapada "If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth." Saint Bartholomew "We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us." Thomas Merton "Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Henry David Thoreau From Chapter 4, Centrality "A person will be called to account on judgment day for every permissible thing that he might have enjoyed but did not." Jerusalem Talmud "The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin "Faith in one's self...is the best and safest course." Michelangelo "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." Henry David Thoreau "To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be." Golda Meir "I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it." Rita Mae Brown "If you always do what interests you, then at least one person is pleased." Katherine Hepburn's mother "Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want." Margaret Young From Chapter 5, Recasting "It's a kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all." James Agee, A Death in the Family "It's not having been in the dark house, but having left it that counts." Theodore Roosevelt "In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity." Albert Einstein "When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity." John F. Kennedy "I think the years I spent in prison have been the most formative and important years in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things." Jawaharlal Nehru "I saw sorrow turning to clarity." Yoko Ono "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." Albert Camus From Chapter 6, Options "Keep on sowing your seeds, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will." Ecclesiastes, 11:6 "Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish." Ovid "Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." Agnes de Mille "You are lost the instant you know what the results will be." Juan Gris "Whatever is flexible and loving will tend to grow; whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die." Lao-tzu "You can plan events, but if they go according to plan they are not events." John Berger "Live! Yes! Life is a banquet and most suckers are starving to death." Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame "Question: What do you see yourself doing five years from now? Answer: I have no idea. I've never had a career plan and never will. I just always make sure that I'm doing something I love at the moment, and I find out where it takes me. I float downriver, then I wake up and say, 'Oh, here I am. I've had a swell float.'" Diane Sawyer, interviewed in US Magazine, September 1997 "The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not." Stephen Sondheim, Move On From Chapter 7, Appreciation "The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness." The Dalai Lama "The secret of health for both the mind and the body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, nor to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly." Buddha "Best to take the moment present, as a present for the moment." Stephen Sondheim, Any Moment "Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly." Old Eskimo saying "Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for the wise men say it is the wisest course." Shakespeare, Henry VI "This is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." Psalms "Do not worry about tomorrow's trouble, for you do not know what the day may bring. Tomorrow may come and you will be no more, and so you will have worried about a world that is not yours." Babylonian Talmud "To be alive, to be able to see, to walk...it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle." Arthur Rubinstein "You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink." G.K. Chesterton "Earth's crammed with Heaven." Elizabeth Barrett Browning From Chapter 8, Giving "If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain." Emily Dickinson "Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love." Lao-tzu "The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own." Benjamin Disraeli "It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Life gets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." Sarah Bernhart "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." The Dalai Lama From Chapter 9, Truthfulness "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night follows day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Shakespeare, Hamlet "When truth is buried, it grows, it chokes, it gathers such explosive force that on the day it breaks out it blows everything up with it." Emile Zola, J'Accuse, 1898 "He offends no one. Yet he speaks the truth. His words are clear. But never harsh." The Dhammapada "When one is pretending, the entire body revolts." Anais Nin "Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening." Oliver Wendell Holmes The Professor at the Breakfast Table "The enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." John F. Kennedy, 1962 "It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself." Thomas Paine "The truth shall make you free." John, 8:32 Home Page Contact Us TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^ TOP^

How We Choose To Be Happy

Rick Foster & Greg Hicks
Leadership Development - Team Dynamics Training - Executive Coaching 4053 Harlan Street, loft 201, Emeryville, CA 94608 phone: (510) 540-1241 fax: (240) 332-8483 email: info@fosterhicks.com

Quotes on Happiness

In How We Choose to Be Happy we were able to rely on a wealth of philosophical, literary and religious sources to validate and reflect the thoughts and feelings expressed by extremely happy people. Happiness is also a hot subject in Pop Culture. We'd like to share some of the quotes from the book with you.

Fundamental to the writing of the book was our interest in the life stories of extremely happy people. Poet and writer Muriel Rukeyser said it best:

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

From the Introduction of How We Choose to Be Happy:

"Happiness depends upon ourselves."

Aristotle

"To live happily is an inward power of the soul."

Marcus Aurelius

"The Kingdom of Heaven is within you...Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all things will be added unto you."

Jesus

"The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart."

Buddha, from The Dhammapada

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
From Chapter 1, Intention

"Those who wish to sing always find a song."

Swedish proverb

"The world of those who are happy is different from the world of those who are not."

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."

Alice Meynell

"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods."

Edith Wharton

"Joy has nothing to do with material things, or with man's outward circumstance...A man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched, and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy."

William Barclay

"Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions."

Aristotle

"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation. Foolish preparation?"

Jane Austen

"Remember that happiness is a way of travel -- not a destination."

Roy M. Goodman

"It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."

Agnes Repplier

From Chapter 2, Accountability

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Let me listen to me and not to them."

Gertrude Stein

"Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame."

Erica Jong

"It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it."

Sophocles, Ajax, c. 450 B.C.

"Self pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in the world."

Helen Keller

From Chapter 3, Identification

"Ordinary riches can be stolen: real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds around my neck."

Emma Goldman

"Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment."

Lao-tzu

"See the false as false, the truth as true. Look into your own heart, follow your nature."

The Dhammapada

"If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth."

Saint Bartholomew

"We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us."

Thomas Merton

"Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."

Henry David Thoreau

From Chapter 4, Centrality

"A person will be called to account on judgment day for every permissible thing that he might have enjoyed but did not."

Jerusalem Talmud

"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."

Lily Tomlin

"Faith in one's self...is the best and safest course."

Michelangelo

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Henry David Thoreau

"To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be."

Golda Meir

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."

Rita Mae Brown

"If you always do what interests you, then at least one person is pleased."

Katherine Hepburn's mother

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want."

Margaret Young

From Chapter 5, Recasting

"It's a kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That's all."

James Agee, A Death in the Family

"It's not having been in the dark house, but having left it that counts."

Theodore Roosevelt

"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

Albert Einstein

"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity."

John F. Kennedy

"I think the years I spent in prison have been the most formative and important years in my life because of the discipline, the sensations, but chiefly the opportunity to think clearly, to try to understand things."

Jawaharlal Nehru

"I saw sorrow turning to clarity."

Yoko Ono

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

Albert Camus

From Chapter 6, Options

"Keep on sowing your seeds, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will."

Ecclesiastes, 11:6

"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish."

Ovid

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."

Agnes de Mille

"You are lost the instant you know what the results will be."

Juan Gris

"Whatever is flexible and loving will tend to grow; whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die."

Lao-tzu

"You can plan events, but if they go according to plan they are not events."

John Berger

"Live! Yes! Life is a banquet and most suckers are starving to death."

Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame

"Question: What do you see yourself doing five years from now? Answer: I have no idea. I've never had a career plan and never will. I just always make sure that I'm doing something I love at the moment, and I find out where it takes me. I float downriver, then I wake up and say, 'Oh, here I am. I've had a swell float.'"

Diane Sawyer, interviewed in US Magazine, September 1997

"The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not."

Stephen Sondheim, Move On

From Chapter 7, Appreciation

"The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness."

The Dalai Lama

"The secret of health for both the mind and the body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, nor to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly."

Buddha

"Best to take the moment present, as a present for the moment."

Stephen Sondheim, Any Moment

"Yesterday is ashes; tomorrow wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly."

Old Eskimo saying

"Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for the wise men say it is the wisest course."

Shakespeare, Henry VI

"This is the day which the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it."

Psalms

"Do not worry about tomorrow's trouble, for you do not know what the day may bring. Tomorrow may come and you will be no more, and so you will have worried about a world that is not yours."

Babylonian Talmud

"To be alive, to be able to see, to walk...it's all a miracle. I have adopted the technique of living life from miracle to miracle."

Arthur Rubinstein

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."

G.K. Chesterton

"Earth's crammed with Heaven."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

From Chapter 8, Giving

"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain."

Emily Dickinson

"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."

Lao-tzu

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own."

Benjamin Disraeli

"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life gets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich."

Sarah Bernhart

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

The Dalai Lama

From Chapter 9, Truthfulness

"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night follows day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Shakespeare, Hamlet

"When truth is buried, it grows, it chokes, it gathers such explosive force that on the day it breaks out it blows everything up with it."

Emile Zola, J'Accuse, 1898

"He offends no one. Yet he speaks the truth. His words are clear. But never harsh."

The Dhammapada

"When one is pretending, the entire body revolts."

Anais Nin

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."

Oliver Wendell Holmes The Professor at the Breakfast Table

"The enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."

John F. Kennedy, 1962

"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself."

Thomas Paine

"The truth shall make you free."

John, 8:32