The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Quotes

Lots and lots of great quotes

  • Quote

    We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence (i.e. sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful) and ability to function in the face of changes in themselves and their relationships with their environment.
    -Aaron Antonovsky

    At a recent Happy at Work seminar for a large group of hospital staff, one participant told me to check out Aaron Antonovsky for his views on health – she thought his thoughts matched ours. I think so too :o)

  • Quote

    There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.

    – Martha Graham

  • You’re fired – you lucky dog

    The NY Times has an interesting article about people who discover, that being fired from their job was the best thing that ever happened to them.

    “Even though I had to sell everything I ever owned and didn’t have any income to support my son, I was suddenly free and happy,”

    I agree. Looking back on my life, I have to say that every major change I’ve made or lived through (even the ones that seemed traumatic at the time) have been changes for the better. Not that I’ve ever actually been fired – I’ve always managed to walk away from jobs I didn’t like any more on my own :o)

  • Quote

    Anybody who thinks work should be miserable simply because it is work or that there should be a cordon sannitaire between ‘work’ and ‘life’ needs to find a time machine, key in the year 1543, and go and join Calvin’s crew. They’ll feel more at home there. In the meantime, the rest of us will get on with enjoying our work, and our workplaces.

    – Richard Reeves in Happy Mondays

  • We the Media

    Dan Gillmor’s new book “We the Media”, can be read for free on the net. The book is about how

    Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media’s monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.

    Yay!

  • Quote

    The First Law of Mentat: A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it, and flow with it.
    – From Dune by Frank Herbert.

    Dune is one of my favourite novels. I read it for the first time when I was 15, and I must’ve read it at least 10 more times since. It has a depth that reveals new details even after many re-re-re-readings. Frank Herbert has created a weird and wonderful world in intricate detail: Technology, religion, politics, ecology, warfare, history and much, much more are all described in a way that is elegant, subtle and above all believable. It’s a world resting in a long-standing precarious balance between mutually opposing forces – a balance which is upset once and for all. There are more Dune-quotes here.

  • Ricardo Semler

    The ever blogging Chris Corrigan points to an excerpt of Ricardo Semler’s book The Seven-Day Weekend. A small teaser:

    I believe the old way of doing business is dying, and the sooner it’s dead and buried the better off we all will be. Incendiary words, yet Semco’s alliance with Cushman & Wakefield, as well as other joint ventures that I will describe shortly, suggests that the transition from the old to the new can be hugely profitable and not nearly as socially disruptive as might be feared at first. On the contrary, the path Semco has been blazing for more than twenty years has led to an unprecedented record of innovation, customer satisfaction, growth, and an end to repressive command-and-control management practices that cause much labor unrest and personal misery, from the top to the bottom of many organizations.

    That does it, Semler is going on my list of people I’ve gotta have a conversation with.

  • Quote

    There are only four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for, and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love.
    – From Don Juan de Marco

  • Quote

    I want to make my music so that it doesn’t force the performers of it into a particular groove, but which gives them some space in which they can breathe and do their own work with a degree of originality. I like to make suggestions, and then see what happens, rather than setting down laws and forcing people to follow them.
    – John Cage

    Via Boingboing.

  • Quote

    If you want to see a cell nucleus, look down this microscope. If you want to see the moons of Jupiter, look through a telescope. On the spiritual side, if you want to see your Buddha nature, if you want to see Christ consciousness, if you want to see the religious side of the equation, fold your legs, sit down each day for two hours, count your breath from one to ten. Do that for five years and get back to me.

    – Ken Wilber