The desire to feel happy or think positively all the time hinders many people's authentic existence. It lowers resilience.

All happiness is of a negative rather than positive nature, and for this reason cannot give lasting satisfaction and gratification, but rather only ever a release from a pain or lack, which must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty yearning and boredom.

Our idea of happiness may be the very thing that’s preventing us from being happy.

While we must learn from good examples and keep always in mind the bigger goal, we must compare ourselves only with ourselves. We can’t focus or base our happiness on another’s progress; we can focus only on our own.

Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.

No truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she's happy. She just is.

If you’re constantly focusing on the future and pinning your happiness there, you’ll be chronically unhappy in the present.

We must focus on the positive instead of the list of negatives we’ve collected over time, and keep that focus regardless of what flies in our faces.

A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of “something else” — a new house, a new relationship, another child, another pay raise. And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. Psychologists sometimes refer to this concept as the “hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.

When we compare, we always look at those who we perceive to be doing better than us; rarely do we look at those who are facing bigger struggles than us. So we never feel grateful for what we do have.

What is wrong with positive thinking? In a word — truth.

Our notions about happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.

"Those only are happy .... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness,

"a crisis in my mental history

until you have formed the habit of looking for the good instead of the bad there is in others, you will be neither successful nor happy.