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 one’s 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 →Children 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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Similar quotes
The mantra that you're given in Transcendental Meditation you keep to yourself. The reason being, true happiness is not out there, true happiness lies within.
David LynchRead
Be easy on yourself. Have fun. Only hang around people that are positive and make you feel good. Anybody who doesn't make you feel good, kick them to the curb. And the earlier you start in your life the better. The minute anybody makes you feel weird and non-included or not supported, you know, either beat it or tell them to beat it.
Amy PoehlerRead
The malicious have a dark happiness.
Victor HugoRead
Each of us has much for which to be grateful if we will but pause and contemplate our blessings.
Thomas S. MonsonRead
It is a flaw In happiness to see beyond our bourn, - It forces us in summer skies to mourn, It spoils the singing of the nightingale.
John KeatsRead
One is only happy in proportion as he makes others feel happy and only useful as he contributes his influences for the finer callings in life.
Milton S. HersheyRead