Most of these are from Gretchen Rubin's "Moment of Happiness" email.

“If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”

• Flannery O’Connor, letter to “A,” 10 Feb 62

“Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.”

• William James

“Energy is the only life, and is from the Body.”

• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“It is harder to fight against pleasure than against anger.”

• Heraclitus

“Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best is right. Every intensification is good.”

• Rainer Maria Rilke

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

• Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

• Henry James

“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”

• Goethe

“Everything that frees our spirit without giving us control of ourselves is ruinous.”

• Goethe

“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."_

• Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

• Epicurus

“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”

• Bertrand Russell

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” from The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

• William Morris

To a friend troubled by melancholy, Samuel Johnson suggested: “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.”

• Samuel Johnson letter to James Boswell, October 27, 1779

“There is a charm, even for homely things, in perfect maintenance.”

• Louis Auchincloss

“Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

• Ovid, Amores

“Sweep everything under the rug for long enough, and you have to move right out of the house.”

• Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban

“One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one’s acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.”

• John Williams, Augustus

“It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves.”

• Rachel Cusk, Outline

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.” – Graham Greene, The End of the Affair “It’s not enough to understand; you’ve got to do something.”

• Sandra Day O’Connor

"There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.”_

• Kazuo Ishiguro, interview

“Choose what is best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.”

• Plutarch

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

• William Butler Yeats

“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.”

• Jane Austen, Emma

“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”

• Bertrand Russell

“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”

• Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

“Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.” – Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness “There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, * not a grain more.”

• Henry David Thoreau, Journal

“But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”

• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The road up and the road down is one and the same.”

• Heraclitus

"That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund."

• Anthony Bourdain

"Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything shall pass."

• Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

• G. K. Chesterton, “The Advantages of Having One Leg”

“We are so accustomed to disguising our true nature from others, that we end up disguising it from ourselves.”

• La Rochefoucauld

"Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to take up and truly live our lives."

• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."

• William James

"In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader's recognition of his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth."

• Le temps retrouvé by Marcel Proust

"Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. Why? Because it's all we ever have."

• Pema Chodron

“Good habits, imperceptibly fixed, are far preferable to the precepts of reason.”

• Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life

“Apply yourself to thinking through difficulties—hard times can be softened, tight squeezes widened, and heavy loads made lighter for those who can apply the right pressure.”

• Seneca

[we must come to our] "journey’s end with a good grace, just as an olive falls when it is fully ripe, praising the earth that bore it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.

• Marcus

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

• Jorge Luis Borges

“Let us decide on the route that we wish to take to pass our life, and attempt to sow that route with flowers.”

• Madame du Chatelet

"Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away."

• Pema Chodron

"I climb up to step down."

He could still hear Anzai's words. But he also thought that the life he'd spent without stepping down had not been wasted. As long as you kept running from birth until death, falling down, getting hurt, no matter how many times you suffered defeat, you got up and started running again. Personal happiness came from all the things and people you came across, ran into by chance along the way. Climber's high. Climbing with all your might, concentrating completely on moving up, never being distracted by the meaningless stuff around you. He'd begun to think it was a fine way to lead a life.

• Hideo Yokoyama, Seventeen

"You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

• Sharon Salzburg

_“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”

• Gertrude Stein, Paris France

“It is all a question of weeding out what you yourself like best to do, so that you can live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises.”

• M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf

“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.”

• Jane Austen, Emma

“The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.”

• Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“One does not ‘find oneself’ by pursuing one’s self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine (even the routine of making beds) who one is and wants to be.”

• May Sarton, The House by the Sea

“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”

• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson, An Inland Voyage

“Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for another hour, but this hour…”

• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

• Soren Kierkegaard, letter, 1847

“Whatever fate befalls you, do not give way to great rejoicings or great lamentation; partly because all things are full of change, and your fortune may turn at any moment; partly because men are so apt to be deceived in their judgment as to what is good or bad for them.”

• Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

“If we pick up a brush, we feel like writing; if we hold a musical instrument in our hands, we wish to play.”

• Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

“Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.”

• La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and Other Reflections

“People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.”

• James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“I was made for the library, not the classroom.The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“It’s not enough to understand; you’ve got to do something.”

• Sandra Day O’Connor

“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

• Octavia E. Butler, “Furor Scribendi,” _Bloodchild: and Other Stories

“Sometimes what you don’t understand keeps you from seeing certain obstacles and in not seeing them, you unknowingly scale them. If [my parents] had understood, they wouldn’t have pushed me so hard. And if they hadn’t pushed me so hard, I wouldn’t have been able to later dig my heels in and push myself.”

• Nnedi Okorafor, Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected

“There’s only one very good life and that’s the life you know you want and you make it yourself.”

• Diana Vreeland, quoted in The Unexpurgated Beaton by Cecil Beaton, forward by Hugo Vickers