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Gretchen Rubin Quotes

Gretchen Rubin quote from classy quote

The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Feelings Growth Happiness Truth

... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Flaws Focus God Humanity Mistakes Perfection

The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It's more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Feelings Giving Happiness Selfishness Selflessness

Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity...When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Affection Happiness Laughter Pleasure Relationships

There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it's not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Abundance Happiness Plenty

Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Beauty Kindness Tolstoy

Accept myself, and expect more of myself. Give myself limits to give myself freedom. Make people happier by acknowledging that they’re not feeling happy. Plan ahead to be spontaneous; only with careful preparation do I feel carefree. Accomplish more by working less. Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection. It’s very hard to make things easier. My material desires have a spiritual aspect. Hell is other people. Heaven is other people.What was “happiness,” anyway, and was it even possible to make myself happier?

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happiness Positive Thinking

Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life---and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion---to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happiness Joy Optimism Pessimism

I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal practices or cite up-to-date studies.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happiness Learning

Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Hypocrisy Kindness Offensive Politeness Tact

I should pursue only those habits that would make me feel freer and stronger.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Confidence Habits

When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure - but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Failure

I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Failure

I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Limitations Personal Growth Self Actualization

Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Anger Research

Although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Actions Feelings Happiness

Experts say that denying bad feelings intensifies them, acknowledging bad feelings allows good feelings to return.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Acceptance Denial Emotional Health Happiness

By mindfully deciding how to act in line with my values instead of mindlessly applying my rules, I was better able to make the decisions that supported my happiness.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happiness Intentionality Rules Values

This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Anxiety Control Happiness

I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You'll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You'll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate small successes, that's what you'll do in adversity.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Adversity

I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn't sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time--but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was productive. Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Family Productivity Time

What's fun for other people may not be fun for you- and vice versa.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Fun Happiness Personality Preferences

When possible, the brain makes a behavior into a habit, which saves effort and therefore gives us more capacity to deal with complex, novel, or urgent matters.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Decisions Habits

Upholders may struggle in situations where expectations aren't clear or the rules aren't established. They may feel compelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they're breaking the rules, even unnecessary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Expectations Habits

Audiences = expectations. If he thinks you're not watching, he won't need to rebel against your expectations.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Expectations

I had everything I could possibly want -- yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Appreciation Happiness

'Potato-chip news' is news that's repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity gossip, sports gossip, or endless photographs of beautiful houses, food, or clothes.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Food Beautiful Effort

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Travel Beautiful Clouds

Growing up in Kansas City, I was always neat, the teacher's pet, know-it-all type.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Pet City Growing Up

They say that people teach what they need to learn. By adopting the role of happiness teacher, if only for myself, I was trying to find the method to conquer my particular faults and limitations.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happiness Myself Conquer

In the scope of a happy life, a messy desk or an overstuffed coat closet is a trivial thing, yet I find - and I hear from other people that they agree - that getting rid of clutter gives a disproportionate boost to happiness.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Life Happy Happy Life

If I can do something in less than one minute, I don't let myself procrastinate. I hang up my coat, put newspapers in the recycling, scan and toss a letter. Ever since I wrote about this rule in 'The Happiness Project,' I've been amazed by how many people have told me that it has made a huge difference in their lives.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Myself Me People

Each week, I post a video about some 'Pigeon of Discontent' raised by a reader. Because, as much as we try to find the 'Bluebird of Happiness,' we're also plagued by those small but pesky 'Pigeons of Discontent.'

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Week Small Try

Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn't-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week - and they work more in their free time, too.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Work Time Happy

We need to have intimate, enduring bonds; we need to be able to confide; we need to feel that we belong; we need to be able to get support, and just as important for happiness, to give support. We need many kinds of relationships; for one thing, we need friends.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Friends Support

As goofy as it sounds, I try to sing in the morning. It's hard both to sing and to maintain a grouchy mood, and it sets a happy tone for everyone - particularly in my case, because I'm tone deaf, and my audience finds my singing a source of great hilarity.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happy Great Singing

It was my interest in happiness that led me to the subject of habits, and of course, the study of habits is really the study of happiness. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Life Happiness Me

One of the best ways to make yourself happy in the present is to recall happy times from the past. Photos are a great memory-prompt, and because we tend to take photos of happy occasions, they weight our memories to the good.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Happy Memories Good

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, we're free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Power Free Want

Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.

~ Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin Technology Internet Limits
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