A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

Many business leaders today view their jobs as entailing responsibility for the welfare of the wider community. These individuals do not define themselves as profit-making machines whose only reason for existing is to satisfy escalating expectation for immediate gain.

A self that is only differentiated - not integrated - may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.

The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.

Sir John Templeton: "My ethical principle in the first place was: 'Where could I use my talents that God gave me to help the most people?'"

..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.