It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.

To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.

Purpose provides activation energy for living.

Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options.

Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.

Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.