What is Happiness?
We are proud to have teamed up with high quality Danish radio station Den2Radio where this years Thales Day is available as a podcast.
In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato says that the wisdom of Thales and the other Seven Sages was reflected in the brief but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met. In this spirit we put together a list of thought-provoking and insigthful quotes from our panel debates at Thales Day (alphabetically organized):
"Happiness consists in many different types of experiences… however a vital element is not just to have your desires and wishes fulfilled, but that you have developed an ability to appreciate life as it is, and find meaning in it"
- Erik Bendtsen (Philosopher)
“Central to understanding happiness is to begin by reflecting on what a human being is, and to understand that we are much more complex creatures than we sometimes think, not least with respect to our emotions”.
- Erik Bendtsen (Philosopher)
“(happiness) has to do with satisfaction, but behind this is a foundation of meaning which you could call a spiritual desire-- a desire to navigate life, to understand, and to not feel impotence in too many situations.”
- Erik Bendtsen (Philosopher)
"A very important aspect of self-respect is that you don’t just pat yourself on the back and say you are good enough, but that you take time to self-reflect and evaluate what values to base your life upon...”
- Erik Bendtsen (Philosopher)
"There are two kinds of complaining: The kind where we are just angry and which is thoughtlessly directed at whatever seems most selfevidently at fault, and then there is the thoughtful criticism, or critical thinking, where we take a step back and try to analyse ourselves objectively from a third person perspective."
- Erik Bendtsen (Philosopher)
“...I think the feeling of happiness is only a fleeting part of happiness, whereas the idea of happiness as a lasting phenomena, which we talk about a lot within the tradition I represent, eternal bliss, has to do with a relation to oneself, but also to something bigger than oneself. Therefore I think that the biggest threat to human beings is not climate change or cancer, but time.”
- Pia Søltoft (Priest)
“The only way philosophy can advance is through critique- not complaining, but one philosopher criticizing the next… If not, we would still be where Thales began.”
- Pia Søltoft (Priest)
"At the end of the day it is the quality of our social relations that determine if we have lived a good life."
- Pia Søltoft (Priest)
“We talk a lot about self-improvement but in reality most people would rather be someone else- they want to be just like the rest and that which they aspire to, and I think he (Søren Kierkegaard) is right about this, and that this is true also in our day in age where we compare ourselves to each-other on social media.”
- Pia Søltoft (Priest)
The highest good is to find meaning and structure...a deep and lasting sense that you are on the right track and on the right shelf,... We should reflect more on why we get up in the morning- what our ideal is- what has made us who we are, and consider if this is also what should bring us forward...human beings have always had this desire to find purpose and structure to life, even before we began contemplating it...it may not bring us a sudden burst of happiness, but it can give us a more lasting and deep sensation that life has a purpose."
- Pia Søltoft (Priest)
"One of the best predictors of whether or not people feel happy, is if they have strong social relations.”
- Meik Wiking (Happiness researcher)
“... you could call us the worlds happiest people, together with the other nordic countries, or the least unhappy, and this is perhaps more accurate. The welfare state is really good at reducing causes of unhappiness; We have access to health care, education, unemployment benefits, the lack of which makes a lot of people around the world unhappy.”
- Meik Wiking (Happiness researcher)
"I don’t know if complaining is something uniquely Danish, because when I am in France they say that “Frenshmen always complain, and this is why we are not happy”, and later when I am in Portugal they say, “We Portugues people are not happy because we always complain”, and they say the same in Estonia and Russia and so on…so I think it is part of being human that we enjoy complaining. There should be a word for the joy of complaining."
- Meik Wiking (Happiness researcher)
“We all have an inner critic which speaks to us in a very foul language and tells us to be ashamed of ourselves, and as long as we blame ourselves we also blame each-other…Therefore I think it is crucial that we let self-love into our lives.”
- Joan Ørting (Sex therapist)
"I think we should marry ourselves before we marry someone else…that we first create a life that we really enjoy, so that we are not seeking a partner because we cannot figure out how to be alone.”
- Joan Ørting (Sex therapist)
"We live in a world where confidence reigns supreme, but we are all imperfect, and when we realize that we can love ourselves as imperfect- and therefore that we can love each other as imperfect, and actually enjoy it, then we can reach unconditional love, and there are probably not so many who experience that these days."
- Joan Ørting (Sex therapist)