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I never talk when I am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious for my unfortunate sitters

A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her

"I hate them for it. An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. If I live, I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."

Public policymakers should never forget about incentives: Many policies change the costs or benefits that people face and, as a result, alter their behavior. A tax on gasoline, for instance, encourages people to drive smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. That is one reason people drive smaller cars in Europe, where gasoline taxes are high, than in the United States, where gasoline taxes are low. A higher gasoline tax also encourages people to carpool, take public transportation, and live closer to where they work. If the tax were larger, more people would be driving hybrid cars, and if it were large enough, they would switch to electric cars.

The opportunity cost of an item is what you give up to get that item. When making any decision, decision makers should be aware of the opportunity costs that accompany each possible action. In fact, they usually are. College athletes who can earn millions if they drop out of school and play professional sports are well aware that their opportunity cost of attending college is very high. It is not surprising that they often decide that the benefit of a college education is not worth the cost.

You will see that incentives play a central role in the study of economics. One economist went so far as to suggest that the entire field could be summarized as simply “People respond to incentives. The rest is commentary.” Incentives are key to analyzing how markets

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate,secretly and unobserved,an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

Qualityless

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me."

Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

Excess wisdom

"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

Everything you do in meditation is amplified. If you meditate for five minutes, totally, with your complete mind focused on happiness, that's like focusing on happiness for several hours as you're walking around. Everything is so intensified. And that happiness will carry over into the rest of your life.

Sit there and smile. This is a very simple practice, but it works. Sit there with your eyes closed or open, as you're sitting in meditation, and stop meditating for a minute. Stop trying to meditate; that's good to do. But just smile. Let your smile get bigger and bigger. Oh, you're unhappy, you're miserable, nothing is working in life, doesn't matter. Smile anyway. Practice smiling for five minutes. And feel grateful. Feel grateful for the fact that you're alive, that you can sit and feel grateful. Feel grateful just to be, to be happy. Sound simple? Sounds facile? So is a warm puppy. So is life. Hey, if you know so much, try it. Sit and smile, for five minutes a day. At some point during your zazen practice, your meditation practice each day, take five minutes and smile -- for five minutes, continuously.

When they get a break from their total pain, they feel a little better and they call it happiness. I mean, it is what it is, but I see it all the time -- in restaurants, in movie theatres, in offices, on the freeways, on the tennis courts. I mean, you've got to be kidding. This is a world of unhappy beings out here -- because they don't understand how simple it is to be happy. It’s very, very simple to be happy. You just have to practice Zen -- zazen, actually, meditation. To meditate is to be free. To meditate is to be happy. There are two kinds of meditation practice. One is formal meditation when you sit each day and meditate. A couple of times a day, stop the body, sit up straight, and practice a meditation and concentration exercise. Clear your mind of all the garbage that runs through it and enter into a higher level of perception. And in that higher level of perception, you will see life as it really is, and when you do that, you will automatically be happy. You will find that spot within yourself that is happiness. Then, when you're not formally sitting and practicing zazen, when you're not practicing meditation, you can do what in Zen we call mindfulness. You can be mindful, which means that the rest of the time, there's more of a passive meditation practice. It's passive when you're active. When you're shopping, you’re talking to someone, you're riding on the subway, you're dodging bullets, you can be meditating. That's passive meditation when you're active. Then there's active meditation, when you’re passive, when you're sitting still. Mindfulness is passive meditation, which you practice all the time unless you're sitting still with the back straight, in which case you're practicing active meditation, meaning you're completely engaged in the practice, which you can do eventually in passive meditation -- when you get good at it, it becomes active meditation. But in the beginning it's passive because your energy and your attention are divided between your actions, thoughts, your sensory data, your feelings, locomotive activities, and your practice, your meditation. Now what is it to meditate? Well, to meditate is to be happy because meditation simply means entering into states of mind, parts of yourself or whatever it is that's in there, which are happiness. Profound happiness, simple happiness, beautiful happiness, complicated, uncomplicated -- there are lots of kinds. There are ten thousand states of mind. Ten thousand to explore and pass through, and beyond all states of mind of course is nirvana, the endless reality, perfection beyond happiness. There's something beyond happiness.

It's because you're too busy, my friend, looking around you and not inside. I mean, everything is inside -- gosh, didn't your mom or dad tell you? Everything is inside you. It's true! The whole universe, everything. How do they fit it? Micro technology. We had it a long time ago when we first invented the universe. How to take a whole universe and put it inside someone's mind. It's one of our better tricks -- systems design from the higher lokas to you.

And there's a whole crazy world around you that you are born into.You can't control it,so don't even try.Because the more you try to control your environment,the more it controls you.

Happiness is separate from daily experience. If picking the right door on the game show and winning all the money makes you happy, then, of course, you know you're going to be unhappy in the future because eventually you'll pick a wrong door. If your happiness is dependent upon what occurs to you -- you got the job, you got the loan, Charlie! Congratulations! You got the loan, now you’ve got the payments. This is going to make you happy? You got the house, wonderful! Now you’ve got the house, you've got another millstone around your neck, right? I mean, it depends how you look at it. Now you're rich and famous, and now everybody wants a part of the action. Not because they like you, but they like what you have, because they think that will make them happy. The rich aren't happy, so they try and get richer thinking it will make a difference, or they use their riches. And the poor aren't happy. They try and get rich thinking that will make a difference. Everybody is dependent upon external circumstances because people don't know the secret of life. Sad! I do. I know

Ah! But in Zen we have a secret. The secret to happiness. Happiness may be a warm puppy, as opposed to a cold duck, but the way you become happy is by realizing that there is no self. Nope. No self at all. Not a half of self, not a quarter of a self, not an eighth, not a sixteenth, not a silly millimeter of self. "No thelf whathsoever," as Daffy Duck would say. No self. There is no self. You don't exist. And when you know this, you'll be happy

Oh God! Things that you can get! Experiences to have!” You think that you're all that. Well, no wonder you're not happy. What an awesome responsibility to carry around all the time. You. Yuck. I mean, how could you possibly be happy if you think you're a person? Because we all know, just by definition, that people are definitely not happy because they take everything so seriously. I mean, I don't know if they take everything seriously, but they take themselves seriously.

Life is happy. Trees are happy. They don't have to do anything to be happy, except just be trees. And maybe if you were just you, you'd be happy. But of course, you don't know who or what you are. So how can you possibly be happy? That's why you've got to study Zen. Or something. I mean call it what you want to, but it has to be a way in which you can discover you, so you cannot distinguish yourself from anything or anyone else. Because you, as we both know, think you're somebody, and that's where the problem begins -- because you're really not somebody, you're everybody. And because you're somebody, you objectify yourself into thinking that you are a particular state of being or mind with a past history, a future identity, things you want, need, plans.

Bhumi

Prajapati

Murugan

Bodhidharma

(Zazen music plays in the background and continues throughout the talk.) Zen Master Rama here. Today our topic is, guess what? Happiness! A warm puppy, right? (Rama laughs.) Could be! We'll find out! Our subject today is happiness. And the koan is, happiness is a warm puppy. As opposed to a cold duck? You're in the magical world of Zen, where anything can happen and usually does because it's your life! And in your life, just about everything happens all the time.

It is worth spelling out exactly what kind ofperformance the economists were looking for—and what the efficient market theo rists were not saying. They were not saying that no one makes money in the market, obviously. Most long-term investors do make a nice return, as well they should—otherwise, why would anyone invest?

To Samuelson, therandom walk suggested that thestock market was aglorified casino. Ifthe daily movements ofstock prices are as unpredictable as the daily lotto numbers, then maybe people who make fortunes inthemarket arelike people who win lotteries. They are lucky, not smart. It follows that all the people who advise clients on which stocks to buy are quacks. The favored analogy was, you might as well choose stocks by throwing darts at the financial pages.

This spoiled Bachelier's neat model. Samuelson found asimple fix. He suggested that each day, astock's price is multiplied by aran dom factor (like 98 or105 percent) rather than increased orde creased by arandom amount. Astock might, for instance, be just as likely to double in price as to halve in price over a certain time frame. This model, called alog-normal orgeometric random walk, prevents stocks from taking on negative values.