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…the people who are the healthiest and happiest resort to the mature defenses in dealing with stress.

…the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do.

Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.

…human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control thigs at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed.

People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.

…all claims of happiness are claims from someone’s point of view – from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience.

…happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe to ourselves and to others, thus evaluating people’s claims about their own happiness is an exceptionally thorny business.

When experiences make us feel sufficiently unhappy, the psychological immune system cooks facts and shifts blame in order to offer us a more positive view.

…wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.

If most of the time you’re not particularly concerned about what you’re doing is work or play, or even whether you’re happy or not, you know you’re living the focused life.