Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent A Year Trying To Sing In The Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, And Generally Have More Fun Quotes

Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.

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

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

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.

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.