Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity... When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.

— Gretchen Rubin

Like most people, I have several pet subjects - that may or may not be interesting to other people. Don't get me started on happiness, or habits, or children's literature, or Winston Churchill, unless you really want to talk about it.

— Gretchen Rubin

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard - or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.

— Gretchen Rubin

Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they're big, flashing signs that something needs to change.

— Gretchen Rubin

Never start a sentence with the words 'No offense.

— Gretchen Rubin

Nothing,' wrote Tolstoy, 'can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

— Gretchen Rubin

Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life---and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion---to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.

— Gretchen Rubin

... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.

— Gretchen Rubin

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.

— Gretchen Rubin

One of the best ways to make yourself happy in the present is to recall happy times from the past. Photos are a great memory-prompt, and because we tend to take photos of happy occasions, they weight our memories to the good.

— Gretchen Rubin