Happiness has three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose—which you need in balance and abundance. And if you don't have all those three, you're not going to be a happy person.

Physical fitness, for me, is a way to manage my negative affect. It's actually a happiness technique for me. It doesn't make me happier; it makes me less unhappy. That's what physical fitness will do—it will buy you less unhappiness.

Fear and love are opposites; they are cognitive and philosophical opposites. Love and hatred are not opposites; hatred is downstream from fear. When we are fearful of being unsuccessful, the remedy to that is more love—and love only comes from human beings.

When you ask people, 'What do you want your relationship to look like in 5 years?', they have kind of this magical notion of an ongoing passion, and that's the wrong goal. The right goal is what is called companionate love. You want to be best friends in 5 years.

Number one... learn your values, act according to your values, practice your values, write it down, journal it. Number two is get your contemplative practice in order, and make sure you start with at least 15 minutes a day. And number three is, actually, read the wisdom literature in whatever tradition you want, and do that daily for at least 15 minutes. Starting their, your life will change.

You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more or permanently and securely by wanting less.

I was making a mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come by having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction... comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants.

One of the greatest attachments that people have in modern life is to their views and opinions. That's a real attachment. It can be as dangerous as your attachment to money or power.

Now the reason I recommend [blood occlusion training] very strongly is because the research suggests that it's very good for both strength and hypertrophy at lower weight levels. So, it saves your joints but gives you results—and that's what you need to do when you're over 40. Save the joints.

The secret to being more satisfied is not having more; it's wanting less. That's the secret.

Happiness is only associated with enjoying jokes; it's not associated with making jokes. It turns out that if you're a funny person, that does not improve your happiness—quite the contrary. But if you enjoy funny things and you have the humility to laugh at other people who are funny, you get the benefits.

What's the hole in our souls that we're trying to fill with the success that we're pursuing in our fluid intelligence curve? It virtually always has to do with love. And why? Because we can get more validation, we can get more satisfaction, early on by sacrificing the non-special love relationships and by being successful.

There is a way to buy happiness, but it's not by buying stuff; it's by buying experiences, it's by buying time, and by giving it away.

Money lowers unhappiness when you move out of deprivation. That's it.

I would never invest in the firm of an entrepreneur who is unwilling to give her or his heart away ... If you're not willing to give your heart away, I'm not gonna put my money in your fund.

The biggest problem with dating today is we're less and less attracted to people. We're less and less attracted because they're too much like us. We need more complementarity and less compatibility.

To find real satisfaction in the second half of life... This is one of the things that all happy older people have in common—they have stopped adding, and they start taking away. They start chipping away.

You notice that people who are really successful who are success addicts, they tend to abuse alcohol more than people who are not. High-socioeconomic status people who work really, really long hours... they tend toward alcoholism; they turn toward drug abuse.

Be careful with your ambition, because it's as addictive as any drug.

Thomas Aquinas says there's 4 substitutes for God, which we can think of as the 4 substitutes for the real secret to happiness. They are money, power, pleasure, and fame.

Traditionally, the loneliest people in America are 60-year-old men.

No possession will do anything beyond bring you out of misery.

Every product, marketing, and team and C-suite of every company in America needs more people over 70.

Only 20% of Americans are morbidly afraid of death.

I love all religions, but I'm in love with the Catholic Church, and I learn as much about who I am as a Catholic by talking to people who are not.

Looking at the data as a social scientist, I know perfectly that the people who tend to be most unhappy at the end of their lives are the people who achieve the most earlier in their lives.