Fantastic Friday - 'Happy' Quotes

The past few days, I’ve noticed online articles about an equation for happiness. The man who’s responsible for it, who spent almost 10 years formulating the equation, is Mo Gawdat, an executive at Google.

He started thinking about it when he realised that, despite having a great job, good income and happy family, he was still unhappy. In an interview with ‘The Independent’, he talked about his theory. “I was born happy and the more I engaged in life the more unhappy I became. I was very unhappy, I was complaining about everything and I was constantly trying to control the world down to a tee. I bought cars, spent money and tried to fill the gap in my soul in any way and it was just not working.”

He ended up testing his equation on himself in a most tragic way when his 21-year-old son, Ali, died in what should have been a routine operation. When it hit him that there was nothing he could do to bring his son back, he realised he had a choice – he could either choose to suffer or he could choose to accept life despite how harsh it had become and try to make each day slightly better than the previous one. And he shares his happiness equation and story in his book, ‘Solve For Happy’.

Instead of going into the details of all that Mo Gawdat has talked about, which can be found in countless interviews and videos on the internet, I thought I’d share ‘happy’ quotes.

‘If you want to be happy, be’ ~ Leo Tolstoy

‘Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness of have gone stark raving mad’ ~ Norm Papernick

‘Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it’ ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

‘The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet’ ~ James Openheim

‘Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important’ ~ Janet Lane

‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life’ ~ Albert Camus

‘We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognising and appreciating what we do have’ ~ Frederick Koenig

‘How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now, and there will never be a time when it is not now’ ~ Gerald Jampolsky

‘The best vitamin to be a happy person is B1’ ~ Unknown

‘Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realise they were the big things’ ~ Robert Brault