The Courage to Be Happy: Discover the Power of Positive Psychology and Choose Happiness Every Day

Is it all right to just stay away from other people, and shut oneself up in one’s room? No, it is not all right. It is not all right at all. The reason it is not is that all the joy of humanity comes from interpersonal relationships too. A person living “all alone in the universe” would have to lead a life that is utterly flat and featureless, with

I am telling you this as a friend. You have been talking about education all day long, but that is not where your real troubles lie. You have not learned to be happy yet. You are not able to have the “courage to be happy.”

Work relationships are relationships of “trust,” and friend relationships are relationships of “confidence.”

By saving another person, one tries to be saved oneself. By passing oneself off as a kind of savior, one attempts to realize one’s own worth. This is one form of the superiority complex that people who cannot dispel their feelings of inferiority often fall into, and is generally referred to as a “messiah complex.” It is a mental perversion of wanti

We humans did not just herd together. Humans discovered the revolutionary way of working called “division of labor.” Division of labor is the incomparable survival strategy that the human race acquired in order to compensate for its physical inferiority. … This is Adler’s final conclusion.

PHILOSOPHER: And now, you are seeking only “to have something given” to you, without having given anything. Just like a beggar. It is not that you are poor financially, but that you are poor in spirit. YOUTH: You disrespectful son of a … !! PHILOSOPHER: We have to keep our hearts abundant and give what we have saved up to others. We must not wait f

It is clear that you are a lover of wisdom. Without shying away from doubt, or from thinking with your own words, you move forward to attain higher understanding. In other words, you are a lover of wisdom, a philosopher.

Why can’t you take off the mask when you are with a normal friend? YOUTH: Because if I did such a thing, the relationship would fall apart! You can talk all you want about “the courage to be disliked” and such, but there’s no such thing as a person who would actually wish to be disliked. We wear the mask to prevent needless conflict from arising, a

The important point here is that these are tasks of interpersonal relationships. In a “work task” situation, for example, rather than treating one’s labor itself as the task, one focuses on the interpersonal relationships that are associated with it. In that sense, it may be easier to understand the tasks by thinking of them as “work relationships,