The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Oliver Burkeman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”
“Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.”
“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.”
“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”
“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
“Ask yourself whether you are happy', observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.' At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly.”
“For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones”
“Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
“[Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.”
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Book Keywords:
stoics, happiness, premeditation-of-evil, judgments, thinking, motivation, work, procrastination, philosophy-of-life, negativity, stoicism, buddhism, psychology, positive-thinking, tranquility, mind
