Top 30 Ingrid Fetell Lee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Burnout often has as much boredom in it as exhaustion.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

2. “Color is energy made visible. It activates an ancient circuit that lights up with pleasure at the idea of finding something sweet to eat. Now, in a world that contains rainbows of artificial colors, we still feel the same joy, even if a colorful object contains no physical nourishment.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

3. “Research shows that celebrating positive events with others increases our feeling that they will be there for us if we encounter tough times in the future. And not only that, but celebrating with others boosts our own joy. People who regularly celebrate positive events with others are happier than those who keep their good news to themselves; and couples who celebrate each other’s good news are happier in their relationships.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

4. “You have a whole world of joy right at your fingertips. There’s no method you need to learn, no discipline you need to impose on yourself. The only requirement is what you already have: an openness to discovering the joy that surrounds you.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

5. “Joy’s power is that small moments can spark big changes. A whimsical outfit might prompt a smile, which inspires a chance kindness toward a stranger, which helps someone who is struggling to get through her day. Even the tiniest joyful gestures add up over time, and before we know it, we have not just a few happier people but a truly joyful world.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

6. “Finding happiness isn’t a matter of creating a perfectly even-keeled experience of the world, where no sadness ever intrudes. Instead it means riding the waves of joy, and trying to find our way back upward when we’ve been knocked down. In renewal we find a kind of resilience, an ability to bounce back from difficulty by reigniting the optimism and hope that rises within us when we believe that joy will return.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

7. “But the god of good taste demands sacrifices, and it’s always the weird, quirky, awkward parts of ourselves that are first to be thrown on the pyre. Yet the weird, quirky, awkward parts are where the surprises lie and, therefore, a great deal of joy.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

8. “We’ve all been told we should dress for the job we want. But what about dressing for the joy we want? When I first started exploring the aesthetics of joy, I began experimenting with wearing bright colors in situations that brought me down.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

9. “Wearing bright color became a way to make herself more accessible to people, short-circuiting their tendency to judge her too quickly. Beth owns no dark coats, only ones in vivid shades like yellow and green. On a miserable winter day she notices that people walk by and smile. It’s almost as if a colorful garment is a tiny gift, a brilliant spot of joy in a bleak landscape.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

10. “The power of the aesthetics of joy is that they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without our even being aware of it.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

11. “Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

12. “While good taste wants things to be simple and normal, joy thrives out on the edges of the bell curve. This is a different manifestation of the surprise aesthetic, one that disrupts our expectations of how things should look and behave. It has a rebellious insouciance, and I wondered what it might mean to add more of this offbeat spirit to our lives.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

13. “Bright hues in the cityscape, found on street signs and in bike lanes, window boxes and graffiti, have become little gifts for me – small infusions of warmth and life.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

14. “The blossoming of the trees, the rising of the sun, the flow of the tides: these recurring events remind us of time’s circular nature and create an underlying cadence of joy that we can rely on.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

15. “The circus and the flea market are so joyful because of the collection of rich, delightful sensations they offer. The abundance aesthetic is defined by a layering of color, texture, and pattern, and you don’t need a lot of stuff to achieve it.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

16. “As lighting manufacturers developed new, more energy-efficient technologies, such as LEDs and fluorescents, suddenly a light bulb was not just a light bulb anymore. But no one told us light-bulb buyers. “People don’t know they should be looking for three thousand degrees Kelvin, or what we call warm light, so instead they come home with four thousand or five thousand degrees Kelvin, which is cool light.” This information is printed on packages, but most people don’t know to look for it.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

17. “Le Corbusier: “The home should be the treasure chest of living.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

18. “I realized that we all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

19. “The Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, the game of ring-around-the-rosy, all describe circular arcs. Bubbles, balls, and balloons: all round. Aesthetically, the story of childhood is the story of the circle and the sphere.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

20. “The more energy we have, the more we are able to play, create, love, lead, explore, rejoice, and engage with the world around us.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

21. “I’ve found that just saying the word “treehouse” causes people to smile, no matter their age. It is like a password to the inner child’s sanctum, a place both exotic and familiar, a place of memories and dreams. The treehouse doesn’t bring us to the highest elevations. It doesn’t offer the broadest vistas. Yet even a shabby, ramshackle tree shelter – a few old boards held together with bent nails and a rope ladder – will radiate more joy than the swankest hilltop estate.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

22. “If your environment makes you feel stable, balanced, and grounded, you’re more likely to feel confident taking measured risks and exploring new opportunities.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

23. “While contentment is curled up on the sofa, and bliss is lost in tranquil meditation, joy is skipping, jiving, twirling, giggling. It is a uniquely exuberant emotion, a high-energy form of happiness.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

24. “The only requirement is what you already have: an openness to discovering the joy that surrounds you.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

25. “Play is one of our greatest means of accessing delight, with deep roots in human life.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

26. “Access to nature has been shown to improve sleep quality, decrease blood pressure, and even lengthen lifespan. Large-scale studies conducted in the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands show that people living in greener areas have a lower incidence of anxiety and depression and display an ability to recover more quickly from stressful life events than those in less green areas.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

27. “While rootedness sounds like the opposite of freedom, after hearing Oakes talk, I realized the two are intimately related. Feeling stable at home has made her feel free to take risks in her professional life she might not otherwise have embraced. By creating a subtle sense of security, the plants have fueled her liberation.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

28. “Whether in hard times or good ones, the benefit of cycles is that they give us something to look forward to, and this anticipation can be a pleasure in its own right.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

29. “According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

30. “In the aesthetic pleasure of wildness, these artists are cultivating a new kind of environmentalism, one that is rooted not in obligation but in joy.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

31. “Just like our taste for sugar and fat, our love of abundance is a remnant of a biological drive designed to help us navigate a scarce and uncertain world.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

32. “From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color. Whether it’s a row of houses painted in bold swaths of candy hues or a display of colored markers in a stationery shop, vibrant color invariably sparks a feeling of delight.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

33. “A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that people with sunny workspaces sleep better and laugh more than their peers in dimly lit offices, and that flowers improve not only people’s moods but their memory as well.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee

34. “Rhythms flow through our muscles, triggering the urge to dance or sway in time with the vibrations around us. In fact, just listening to music activates the motion centers of the brain, even when our bodies are still, which is why we often find ourselves snapping or tapping along to a beat without even realizing we’re doing so.”

— Ingrid Fetell Lee