“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

— Cory Doctorow

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

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Cory Doctorow 53

Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction a… 1971

Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer

Source: Sweethearts

“Think thoughts that make you happy. Do things that make you feel good. Be with people who make you feel good. Eat things that make your body feel good. Go at a pace that makes you feel good.”

Louise L. Hay book You Can Heal Your Life

Source: You Can Heal Your Life

“All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/138/mode/1up p. 138

“The moving mind looks for happiness in getting and experiencing things. These do not suffice, for, when the mind has one thing it immediately rushes after another. The still mind finds happiness in everything.”

Shantananda Saraswati (1934–2005) Hindu spiritual teacher

Teaching of His Holiness Shantanand Saraswati, The Study Society 2018

“I can't pretend that I got involved with filming the natural world fifty years ago because I had some great banner to carry about conservation - not at all, I always had a huge pleasure in just watching the natural world and seeing what happens. - I made those films because it was a hugely enjoyable thing to do. But as I went on making them it became more and more apparent that the creatures that were giving me so much joy were under threat. The fun is in delighting in the animals but if you do that you owe them something so you have an obligation to speak out and to do what you can to protect them. m3s08-m4s05”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

“While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it we do suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek (1946), Ch. 6

“One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: the only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Letter to his mother, written from the University of Pennsylvania (12 February 1904), published in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957) edited by John C. Thirlwall, p. 5
General sources

“Nourished people, people who love and care for themselves, are also more efficient and nicer to be around. When you give yourself permission to relax, people will feel more relaxed around you; your environment will become more harmonious. Balance—between work and pleasure, giving and receiving, seriousness and levity—creates a happy healthy life.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

Quantum Wellness (2008)

“Does not everyone who describes something he has experienced believe basically that whatever happens to him has some sort of relevance.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“When you do something that works you have a happiness, but I don't know if it's a feeling of power. Power is a frightening thing and that's not what I'm interested in. I want to do certain things and make them right in my mind and that's it.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

McKenna interview (1992)

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