Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.
It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
Everyday happiness means you can't wait to come home, because the soup is hot.
Sometimes people will think, I need to have pre-sanctioned spiritual joy. Getting joy from my contemplative meditation practice or getting joy from reading Thich Nhat Hahn books. Those things can be joyful but I think it’s the small, simple joys of playing with dogs or having sex with someone you love or going for a walk outside, stuff that we tend to ignore.
I grew up around people that enjoyed life day to day and found pleasure in simple things.
The things that brought me the most comfort now were too small to list. Raspberries in cream. Sparrows with cocked heads. Shadows of bare limbs making for sidewalk filigrees. Roses past their prime with their petals loose about them. The shouts of children at play in the neighborhood, Ginger Rogers on the black-and-white screen.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions.
My kitchen linoleum is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone.
We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead.
My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, 'Oh God, I've got to do this today.'
It is not great, but little good-haps that make up happiness.
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness
Happiness is never grand.
In my real life, I see people who are really enjoying their lives - I mean, really enjoying their lives - and they take joy in their daily obligations; they just do. And I believe that at a certain point, you've got to choose to be that way. You choose to approach your life that way. Or it's all kind of a drag until Friday.
Living big and joyful and content is almost always the result of our finding satisfaction in life's ordinary day-to-day pleasures. And God must be fond of them, too, for He made so many of them for us to enjoy.
I got me a fine wife and I got me old fiddle, when the suns coming up I got cakes on the griddle. And life ain't nothing, but a funny, funny riddle.
Sometimes the little things in life mean the most.
People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.
For me, the small joys of life make me happy.
I have a very positive outlook on life. And not even tennis. Just even off-court, I would say everything that I'm doing daily, and I hope I continue to think like this and, you know, can enjoy each and every single day.
Joy comes to us in moments--ordina ry moments. We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.
Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts.
Most people tell you there are certain moments you should celebrate in life: for example, the weekend coming, so you should party on a Friday. Or your birthday or New Year's Eve. But what if you're excited about being alive every day? Can't you be in that celebratory state every moment you're not dead?
