Happiness is a decision, an outlook. We owe it to ourselves to be happy.

Paramahansa Yogananda was one of the earliest yoga teachers to reach America. He was exceptionally well liked for his ability to reconcile many different world views in his simple and clear message of compassionate service. The following are a selection of quotes from a book of his teachings entitled, How To Be Happy All The Time.

Happiness is a Choice

If you want to be sad, no one in the world can make you happy. But if you make up your mind to be happy, no one and nothing on earth can take that happiness from you.

Finding Your Life’s Path

You should definitely discover your life’s path, by analyzing early childhood and present life, before you hastily sidetrack in a wrong direction. Then, after you find your path, try to build around it all the creative moneymaking methods at your command. Your moneymaking methods, however, must be made within the boundaries of your idealism – otherwise, you may have money but not happiness. Happiness is only possible when the desire for making money cannot lure you to travel on the wrong path.

Business Can Be Spiritual

Business life need not be a material life. Business ambition can be spiritualized. Business is nothing but serving others materially in the best possible way. People label those stores that start out with only the idea of making money, “moneymaking dens.” But stores that concentrate wholly on serving customers with the best articles at a minimum costs are the ones that will always succeed and that will advance the moral development of the world.

Strong Character

Persons of strong character are usually the happiest. They do not blame others for troubles that can be traced to their own actions and lack of understanding. They know that no one has the power to add to their happiness or detract from it unless they allow the adverse thoughts or wicked actions of others to affect them.

Superior Joys

Pure love, sacred joy, poetic imagination, kindness, wisdom, peace, and happiness are felt inside first in the mind or the heart, and are then transmitted through the nervous system to the physical body. Understand and feel the superior joys of the inner life and you will prefer them to the fleeting pleasure of the outer world. All physical pleasures arise on the surface of the body and are experience by the mind through the nervous system. You love the outer pleasures of the sense because you happened to be captured by them first, and then you remained their prisoner.

Desires Postpone Happiness

The man whose entire happiness is dependent upon the creation and fulfillment of new desires can never be happy, for his happiness is always dependent upon something that he expects to have sometime in the future.

Overindulgence Undermines Pleasure

No matter how pleasurable a thing is, if you over-indulge in it, it ceases to give pleasure and gives pain instead.

Proper Charity

Charity must never deprive its recipients of their divine dignity. When giving, we should encourage others to give at least something in return. We should make them feel our gratitude, too, for their assistance.

Focus and Worry

The more widely we scatter our energies, the less power we have left to direct toward any specific undertaking. Octopus habits of worry and nervousness rise from ocean depths in the subconscious, fling tentacles around our minds, and crush to death all that we once knew of inner peace.

Helping Others

One of Life’s unwritten laws is that he who helps others to abundance and happiness will always be helped in return, and he will become more and more prosperous and happy.

Strength and Kindness

It is human weakness to get angry and scold, but it is divine strength to hold the reins of your temper and speech. No matter what provokes you, behave yourself. By calm silence, or by genuine kind words, show that your kindness is more powerful than the other person’s ugliness.

Self Improvement

Whatever you want others to be, first be that yourself. Then you will find others responding in like manner to you.

Importance of Frugality

To try to own more than your purse allows is to live in constant mental worry. To spend more than you earn is to live in perpetual slavery.

Others

Money is made for happiness and not happiness made for money.
There are no obstacles, there are only opportunities.
Be calmly active, and actively calm. That is the way of the yogi.
Escape lies not in indulgence, but in self-control.
We can only be happy by making others happy.