Chapter 6.

“Regardless of time and place human beings cherish a common desire for happiness and a wish to avert suffering” – The Dalai Lama

The quote that I will first be using is in the book “The Art of Being Human” and it is by The Dalai Lama and they said “Regardless of time and place human beings cherish a common desire for happiness and a wish to avert suffering. I think this quote is very true because majority of the time no one is one hundred percent happy. Everyone goes through rough times. Some people actually show it on their exterior that their unhappy, whereas some people have the brightest personalities and smiles but their dying on the inside. No one wants to continuously go through life with the feeling of suffering. Suffering can be a wide range of different things, everyone has different levels of pain, emotionally and physically. Everyone deals with suffering in different ways, some never get past the bad days. The days are filled with so much suffering that everything blurs together and it pushes them over the edge. That whys happiness is strived for. And sometimes its up to us to make our own happiness.

“A real obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness” – Fontenelle

The next quote that I am going to use if by Fontenelle and they said “A real obstacle to happiness is to expect too much happiness”. I agree with this statement especially when people rely their happiness on other people. People who can’t seem to get in the right mind space or who deal with depression tend to either shut others out or become dependent on them to pull them out of this rough patch. For some, people are only happy around other people, their moods vibe with the other persons mood. And when they are with that person the whole day and when they are alone at night they realize that their quick dose of happiness was only temporarily. They expect too much. Your happiness has to come from within in order to be truly happy. You can rely on anyone or anything.

“Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences” – Norman Cousins

The final quote I will be writing about is by Norman Cousins and he said “Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences”. Wisdom comes from experiences. The more mistakes we make, the more we learn from it. Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to keep making mistakes in order to learn and grow. We can get wisdom and insight from many things, such as how are friends behave and the consequences that follow them or learning from you parents. There are times where we just have knowledgable wisdom and we can decipher between right and wrong. Many people think that wisdom comes with age. Even though that statement is relatively true, it depends on whether or not that person has learned their lesson. Someone can be 64 and still have the mindset of a 13 year old. It just depends on how your able to take your mistake and learn from it and help others to not make the same mistake that they may have made.

Janaro, R. P., & Altshuler, T. C. (2009). The art of being human: The humanities as a technique for living. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing.