Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.
Interpretation
True happiness comes from fully engaging with life's experiences and finding meaning in them.
This quote by John Dewey emphasizes that authentic happiness is derived from actively participating in our lives and experiences. It suggests that by engaging fully with our capabilities and striving to extract unique meaning from each situation, we can achieve deeper satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal growth.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
It science involves an intelligent and persistent endeavor to revise current beliefs so as to weed out what is erroneous, to add to their accuracy, and, above all, to give them such shape that the dependencies of the various facts upon one another may be as obvious as possible.
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
The reactionaries are in possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the press and the schools
If I can bring joy into the world, if I can get people to stop thinking about their pain for a moment, or the fact the tomorrow morning they're going to get up and tell their boss off... then I'll be successful.
When we direct our thoughts properly i.e. 'Things could be worse but aren't', we can control our emotions... i.e. and feel relieved, grateful, satisfied, hopeful and happy
I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn't enough. I was exploding inside.
Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Gratitude goes beyond the 'mine' and 'thine' and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
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