The circumstances of our lives actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives.
Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually ... once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.
Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new
Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine.
Once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on.
When you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a philosopher.
Reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness.
When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible ... you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined.
