Social

Happiness is . . . ? How would you finish the sentence? What do you think happiness is? Positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, says it is is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

People can’t live on bread alone. They also need hope.

"All your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature" through the decisions you make, wrote CS Lewis. If the choices we make really have such an impact, how can Christians make sure they make the right decisions?

Our number of friends tends to decrease as we get older, but this trend, which has many negative effects, can be actively combated even when old age has already set in.

I walked into my boss’s office. For several years I’d been trying to manage a full-time job on part-time hours, complete my master's degree, support my husband in his career and run a busy home occupied by three children. The previous month, a friend had died tragically and unexpectedly, and in the previous week several major work and family crises had been bouncing...

Thousands of cries for help are hidden every day behind extreme violence or riots. Few of them overcome the wall of our indifference and prejudice, and even fewer of those in need get a second chance. Stories like that of Sephton Henry show what it means to offer help even when change for the better seems impossible.

The importance of humour, including in the workplace, is often undervalued, as a series of studies suggest.

The Flight from God describes the experience of distancing oneself from God. When we are under the impression that we are running away and that we reach a space where God is absent, we discover that God is already there, inviting us to believe.

Sometimes I think I was born with a magnifying glass in my hand, one through which I critically scrutinize everything I do and say and which relentlessly magnifies every imperfection.

Every day is an opportunity to ask ourselves how it is that human life has such little value in the eyes of some of our contemporaries—those contemporaries living in freedom and democracy (on paper, at least), who are educated and socialised within the same civilization as we are, often even in the same community, or under similar civil laws and generally having the...

To have willpower does not mean saying you want to do something, it means to actually be doing it—André Maurois

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

"What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare." — from the poem "Leisure" by William H. Davies.

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."