The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life

By Richard Schoch

Book Overview

The Secrets of Happiness is a philosophical inquiry into the nature of happiness.
Combining wit, warmth, and intellectual authority, this book offers us ancient wisdom for modern living. Richard Schoch shows readers how they can enrich their lives by recovering the ancient philosophical and religious traditions of happiness--and then putting them to work in their own lives today. In a journey across cultures and centuries--from the trials of Job to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and from Buddha's Four Noble Truths to the ecstasy of medieval Sufi mystics--Schoch answers questions that, although fundamental to our well-being, are rarely asked: what kind of effort does it take to be happy? do you have a right to be happy? can you be happy if others are unhappy?
Although Schoch finds that there is no single answer to these questions, he argues that every strategy for happiness can be placed in one of four categories: Living for Pleasure, Conquering Desire, Transcending Reason, and Enduring Suffering. (The book is divided into these four parts.)
The one thing that these disparate strategies do share is that each takes effort. Happiness, Schoch posits, is never an end-point; it is instead "a joyful struggle."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743292936
• ISBN13: 9780743292931
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

"The Secrets of Happiness" is an insightful, informed, thoughtful and though-provoking self-help boo

Is the new 'science' of happiness resulting in further dissatisfaction in life? New age teachers would offer up happiness as a consumer right, but The Secrets of Happiness by Richard Schoch shows it isn't that easy - and contends such happiness must be found from within. Philosophy and religion blend in a survey which considers how happiness is conceived, pursued, and misconstrued. "The Secrets of Happiness" is an insightful, informed, thoughtful and though-provoking self-help book that is especially commended to the attention of non-specialist general readers seeking simple happiness in an ever increasingly complicated world. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Paths to Happiness

This is a superb book! I agree entirely with the two editorial reviews. This is a seriuous discussion of what is truly a happy and meaningful life. The author rejects the "science of happiness" where happiness is defined as simply pleasure and contentment and subjectively "feeling good." He describes the essential views on happiness of utilitarians, epicureans, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians,Muslims, the stoics and Judaism, fairly and sympathetically, how they are similar and how they differ, and what we all can learn from each approach.