Happiness - 1

In a few messages I'd like to share with you my highlights of a book i read recently: "Happiness" by Mathieu Ricard.

• We take for permanent that which is ephemeral and for happiness that which is but a source of suffering:the desire for wealth, for power, for fame, and for nagging pleasures.
• Living on a pendulum between hope and doubt, excitement and boredom, desire and weariness, it's easy to fritter away our lives, bit by bit, without even noticing, running all over the place and getting nowhere. Happiness is a state of inner fulfillment, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for outward things."
• Happiness is a skill, a manner of being, but skills must be learned.
• Pleasure is exhausted by usage, like a candle consuming itself. Savoring a delicious meal is a source of genuine pleasure, but we are indifferent to it once we've had our fill and would get sick of it if we continued eating.
• Pleasure is the happiness of the madmen, while happiness is the pleasure of sages.
• A poet Robert Burns describes pleasure:
  But pleasures are like poppies spread,
  You seize the flower, its bloom is shed,
  Or like the snow falls in the river,
  A moment white - then melts forever.
• Remaining painfully obsessed with a situation or the memory of a departed loved one, to the point of being paralyzed by grief for months or years, is evidence not of affection, but of an attachment that does no good to others or to oneself.
• If we let ourselves be over whelmed by our personal problems, no matter how tragic, we only increase our difficulties and become a burden on those around us.If our mind becomes accustomed to dwelling solely on the pain that events or people inflict on it, one day the most trivial incident will cause it infinite sorrow. As intensity of the feeling grows with practice, everything that happens to us will eventually come to distress us, and peace will find no place within us.
• If there is a cure, what good is discontent? If there is no cure, what goos is discontent?!!