Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Happy people feel purposeful and useful, similar to practical items.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver suggests that a key distinction between happy individuals and those who are less content is the feeling of being useful and practical. Just as common objects have defined purposes, the sense of being valuable and serving a function in the world contributes significantly to oneβs happiness and fulfillment.
Themes
HappinessPurposeUtilityFulfillmentMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about finding joy in life, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of feeling useful.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes βChildren can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
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I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
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Similar quotes
And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.
Elizabeth GilbertRead
Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck.
Haruki MurakamiRead
The whole idea of music, from the beginning of time, was for people to be happy
Robert PlantRead
Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is
C. S. LewisRead
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
Martin SeligmanRead