Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

We look for happiness outside ourselves when it is basically an inner state of being.

Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things.

We incur suffering but we create unhappiness.

Pleasures become obstacles only when they upset the mind’s equilibrium and lead to an obsession with gratification or an aversion to anything that thwarts them.

So long as we are slaves to the dissatisfaction and frustration that arise from the confusion that rules our minds, it will be just as futile to tell ourselves “I’m happy! I’m happy!” over and over again as it would be to repaint a wall in ruins.

This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.

We all know how very clever and tireless our consumer society is at inventing countless bogus pleasures, laboriously hyped stimulants designed to keep us in a state of emotional tension capable of triggering a kind of mental anesthesia. A Tibetan friend of mine who was contemplating the flashy advertising billboards in New York commented: “They are

The world of ignorance and suffering—called samsara in Sanskrit—is not a fundamental condition of existence but a mental universe based on our mistaken conception of reality.

The fleeting experience of pleasure is dependent upon circumstance, on a specific location or moment in time. It is unstable by nature, and the sensation it evokes soon becomes neutral or even unpleasant.