Top 250 Gretchen Rubin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started.”

— Gretchen Rubin

52. “Self-measurement brings self-awareness, and self-awareness strengthens our self-control.”

— Gretchen Rubin

53. “There’s a great satisfaction in knowing that we’ve made good use of our days, that we’ve lived up to our expectations of ourselves.”

— Gretchen Rubin

54. “Underreact to a problem.”

— Gretchen Rubin

55. “When we do stumble, it’s important not to judge ourselves harshly. Although some people assume that strong feelings of guilt or shame act as safeguards to help people stick to good habits, the opposite is true. People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.”

— Gretchen Rubin

56. “Life is too short to save your good china or your good lingerie or your good ANYTHING for later because truly, later may never come.”

— Gretchen Rubin

57. “Look for happiness under your own roof.”

— Gretchen Rubin

58. “Enthusiasm is more important than innate ability, it turns out, because the single more important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice.”

— Gretchen Rubin

59. “Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy outperform the less happy. Happy people work more hours each week – and they work more in their free time, too.”

— Gretchen Rubin

60. “Happy people make people happy, but I can’t make someone be happy, and no one else can make me happy.”

— Gretchen Rubin

61. “Behind our unremarkable front door waits the little world of our making – our home.”

— Gretchen Rubin

62. “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” – G. K. Chesterton What’s.”

— Gretchen Rubin

63. “I am living my real life, this is it. Now is now, and if I waited to be happier, waited to have fun, waited to do the things that I know I ought to do, I might never get the chance.”

— Gretchen Rubin

64. “Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.”

— Gretchen Rubin

65. “One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.”

— Gretchen Rubin

66. “We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.”

— Gretchen Rubin

67. “I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time – but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.” Time spent with my family and friends was never wasted.”

— Gretchen Rubin

68. “When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure – but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”

— Gretchen Rubin

69. “Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.”

— Gretchen Rubin

70. “Now is now. Here is my treasure.”

— Gretchen Rubin

71. “He is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.”

— Gretchen Rubin

72. “I can build a happy life only on the foundation of my own nature.”

— Gretchen Rubin

73. “People feel happier when they feel like they’re progressing. When they feel like something in their life is growing or getting better.”

— Gretchen Rubin

74. “Contemporary research shows that happy people are more altruistic, more productive, more helpful, more likable, more creative, more resilient, more interested in others, friendlier, and healthier. Happy people make better friends, colleagues, and citizens.”

— Gretchen Rubin

75. “Getting paperwork under control makes me feel more in control of my life generally.”

— Gretchen Rubin

76. “The Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation.”

— Gretchen Rubin

77. “You can choose what you do, you cant choose what you like to do.”

— Gretchen Rubin

78. “A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.”

— Gretchen Rubin

79. “A book is a better way to develop a complicated idea, or to tell a big story and to show how ideas weave in and out of each other, which is something that comes up a lot in happiness because all these ideas are interconnected.”

— Gretchen Rubin

80. “The more I examine the issue of clutter, the more effort I put into combating it, because it really does act as a weight.”

— Gretchen Rubin

81. “It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome.”

— Gretchen Rubin

82. “In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all – yet somehow they do.”

— Gretchen Rubin

83. “What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you- and vice versa.”

— Gretchen Rubin

84. “I started to apply the “one-minute rule”; I didn’t postpone any task that could be done in less than one minute.”

— Gretchen Rubin

85. “My happiness project was both. I wanted to perfect my character, but given my nature, that would probably involve charts, deliverables, to-do lists, new vocabulary terms, and compulsive note taking.”

— Gretchen Rubin

86. “When scheduling a new habit, it helps to tie it to an existing habit, such as “after breakfast,” or to an external cue, such as “when my alarm rings,” because without such a trigger, it’s easy to forget to do the new action.”

— Gretchen Rubin

87. “Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.”

— Gretchen Rubin

88. “There are times in the lives of most of us,” observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.”

— Gretchen Rubin

89. “This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.”

— Gretchen Rubin

90. “One of the best ways to make yourself happy in the present is to recall happy times from the past. Photos are a great memory-prompt, and because we tend to take photos of happy occasions, they weight our memories to the good.”

— Gretchen Rubin

91. “There is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and cotton shirts, but it’s not nice to be surrounded by things that are worn out or stained or used up.”

— Gretchen Rubin

92. “We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then – and this is the best part – we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, were free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.”

— Gretchen Rubin

93. “Happiness is hard because it’s very subjective. I know the people that seem happiest to me, but whether they are actually – what they’re really like inside is really hard to say.”

— Gretchen Rubin

94. “I’m a creature of routine, and I hate feeling incompetent, so I avoided novelty and challenge. Making an effort to push myself in that way has brought me surprising boost.”

— Gretchen Rubin

95. “The most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.”

— Gretchen Rubin

96. “Some kind of clutter is difficult – letting go of things with sentimental value, sifting through papers – but some clutter I find very refreshing to clear. I drive my daughters nuts because I’m always wandering into their rooms to clear clutter.”

— Gretchen Rubin

97. “Pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.”

— Gretchen Rubin

98. “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

— Gretchen Rubin

99. “Having a messy coat closet should not be a big deal in a full life, and yet there’s something about getting control of that coat closet that’s surprisingly satisfying.”

— Gretchen Rubin

100. “If I pretend to myself that I’m different from the way I truly am, I’m going to make choices that won’t make me happy.”

— Gretchen Rubin