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This is the secret of happiness that you have been looking for: If you are moving in the direction of your identified desires, you're happy in this moment. If you're moving in opposition to your identified desires, you are unhappy in this moment.Abraham Hicks
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The secret to happiness is elusive because it is a paradoxical truth. To gain happiness, you must first cease pursuing it. Things perceived to provide happiness are like shiny, pretty bubbles that lure us this way and that way, chasing after their glossy buoyancy. But once they are handled, they “pop”–empty–vanishing along with the hope that happiness could ever be captured. Happiness cannot be caught or won or purchased or even handled. Happiness simply forms like a rainbow in the kindest and most grateful hearts.Richelle E. Goodrich
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When I was a young philosopher, I asked a senior colleague, Pat Suppes (then and now a famous philosopher of science and an astute student of human nature), what the secret of happiness was. Instead of giving me advice, he made a rather droll observation about what a lot of people who were happy with themselves seem to have done, namely:1. Take a careful inventory of their shortcomings and flaws2. Adopt a code of values that treats these things as virtues3. Admire themselves for living up to it Brutal people admire themselves for being manly; compulsive pedants admire themselves for their attention to detail; naturally selfish and mean people admire themselves for their dedication to helping the market reward talent and punish failure, and so on.John R. Perry