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Indirect approaches

Various writers, including Camus and Tolle, have written that the act of searching or seeking for happiness is incompatible with being happy.

John Stuart Mill believed that for the great majority of people happiness is best achieved en passant, rather than striving for it directly. This meant no self-consciousness, scrutiny, self-interrogation, dwelling on, thinking about, imagining or questioning on one's happiness. Then, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, one would "inhale happiness with the air you breathe."

William Inge said that "on the whole, the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except the fact that they are so." Orison Swett Marden said that "some people are born happy."