
“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”
Source: Agnes Grey
1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
Context: The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.
“Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read.”
Source: Agnes Grey
Source: Ethan Frome and Other Short Fiction
“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.”
In an interview https://80000hours.org/2014/10/interview-holden-karnofsky-on-the-importance-of-personal-fit/ with Benjamin Todd, January 2014
As quoted in in Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920 (1922) by Carl Clinton Van Doren
Context: I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.
That Sort of Bear.
Source: The Tao of Pooh (1982)