Happiness Research Quotes

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.

I want to know where joy lives. I'd interview scientists, religious leaders and heads of state. I'd want to find out exactly what makes people happy. I'd want to look into the biology, the chemistry of the human brain.

Gratitude always comes into play; research shows that people are happier if they are grateful for the positive things in their lives, rather than worrying about what might be missing.

While most of us know that we feel better after a good hearty laugh, science, in many cases, is yet to prove why.

Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.

There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

One Dilbert Blog reader noted that current research shows that happiness causes success more than success causes happiness. That makes sense to me. There's plenty of research about people having a baseline of happiness that doesn't vary much with circumstances. And given that happy people are typically optimistic, energetic, and fun to work with, I can see how happiness would lead to success.

It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not.

One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should.

I always wanted to understand the causes of happiness. I'm a bit of a scientist, I guess you could say.

I usually start with a big question, such as whether people today are happier than in the past, or why men have dominated women in most human societies. And then I follow the question instead of trying to follow my own answer, even if it means I can't formulate any clear theory.

I'm not a big proponent of happiness. I think it's highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There's so much value in that. You can't have one without the other.

Happiness quantification sounds a bit wishy-washy, sure, and through a series of carefully administered surveys across the globe, economists and psychologists have certainly confronted a fair number of sticky issues around how to measure, and even define, happiness.

Education, and I regret to say this as an educator, but there's no indication that education has a direct effect on happiness.

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.

Happy people are poor psychologists.

The research says that being successful doesn't automatically make you happier, but being happier - being more positive - makes you more successful.

At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.

In general, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious people - under various definitions of "religiosity," such as church attendance or professed spiritual beliefs.

We tend to think that employment is employment, and we don't ask the question: is this rewarding employment? Research establishes pretty clearly that typical notions of happiness - that more is better - really don't correspond to the way people think and feel.

Study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.

Researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period.