quotes from "The Good Life"

2023.02.22
For the Science and Spirituality reading and discussion group I help lead we read "The Good Life" about The Harvard Study of Adult Development, where they studied one cohort of Harvard young men and another of Boston disadvantaged male teens. You can get a good feel for the book from Bob Waldingers TED talk

Here are some tidbits from the book, mostly stuff the book itself quoted...
There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Mark Twain

The best ideas aren't hidden in shadowy recesses. They're right in front of us, hidden in plain sight.
Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

[Western Culture gives us] extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
David Foster Wallace

Love by its very nature is unworldly.
Hannah Arendt

When asked to describe his philosophy for getting through hard times, [study participant Sterling Ainsley] said, "You try not to let life get to you. You remember your victories and take a positive attitude."
Bob Waldinger and Marc Schulz in "The Good Life" on The Harvard Study of Adult Development

Attention is the most basic form of love.
John Tarrant

There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the [Study].... One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.
George Vaillant, former direct of the Harvard Study of Adult Development

You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

There's an old adage in psychiatry: Don't just do something, sit there.
Waldinger + Schulz, "The Good Life"

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau

Bob thinks of a moment when, as a young man, he was going through a time in which he was incredibly angry at his parents, and an uncle took him aside. *I know you're mad*, his uncle said. *But just remember: nobody is ever going to care about you this much ever again.*