the happiest people, the ones who have successfully purified their minds of all conditioning and craving, tend to have such a strong compassion and understanding of love that their lives naturally focus on giving to others. in this giving and clarity of mind they find happiness.

A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.

A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme lengths to seek them out: It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.

To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.

the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.

Persons of strong character are usually the happiest. They do not blame others for troubles that can be traced to their own actions and lack of understanding. They know that no one has the power to add to their happiness or detract
from it, unless they themselves allow the adverse thoughts or wicked actions of others to affect them.

A 2003 World Value Survey (worldvaluessurvey.com) found that the happiest people in the world have a tight sense of community and strong family bonds. After basic needs are met (security, shelter, health, food), our happiness quotient is most significantly impacted by the quality of our relationships with our partners, our family, our friends, our spirituality, and ourselves.

can tell you the happiest a person can possibly be. ’Cause I’ve taken note of it. The happiest you can be is to be from a Latin country and score a goal in soccer. It’s probably four to eight seconds. But I don’t think it’s possible to be happier than that. I’ve never seen a greater happiness than that. Can you name me a happier person? Happier than that? Happiest you can be. I don’t think you can beat it. No sex stuff either. That’s too easy.

The happiest man is the one who knows how to obtain the greatest sum of happiness without ever failing in the discharge of his duties, and the most unhappy is the man who has adopted a profession in which he finds himself constantly under the sad necessity of foreseeing the future.

Structural analysis leads to some surprising conclusions concerning “normal” people, which are nevertheless in accord with competent clinical judgment. In structural terms, a “happy” person is one in whom important aspects of the Parent, the Adult, and the Child are all syntonic with each other….The following anecdote illustrates the structure of the “happy” personality carried to its logical end: A young man came home one day and announced to his mother: “I’m so happy! I’ve just been promoted!” His mother congratulated him, and as she got out the bottle of wine she had been saving for such an occasion, she asked him what his new appointment was. ‘This morning,” said the young man, “I was only a guard at the concentration camp, but tonight I’m the new commandant!” “Very good, my son,” said his mother, “see how well I’ve brought you up!” In this case, Parent, Adult, and Child were all interested in and gratified by his career, so that he met the requirements for “happiness.” He fulfilled his mother’s ambitions for him with patriotic rationality while obtaining gratification of his archaic sadism. In this light, it is not so surprising that in real life many of these people were able to enjoy good music and literature in their leisure hours. This distasteful example raises some serious questions about certain naive attitudes concerning the relationship between happiness, virtue, and usefulness, including the Greek aspect of “good workmanship.” It is also an effective illustration for people who want to know “how to raise children” but cannot specify clearly what they want to raise them to be. It is not enough to want to raise them to be “happy.