Quotes About Fulfillment

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." -Abraham Lincoln

Life's too short to be miserable, basically. If you can be happy, then be happy.

How satisfied are you with your life? How does your life compare with the best possible life you could imagine for yourself?

if money does not necessarily increase life satisfaction, what does?

Deeper satisfaction comes not from feeling good, he taught, but from doing good: from cultivating and maintaining virtuous habits that balance one's own life and create and deepen ties with others.

Having parented successfully in the past may rank as a satisfying accomplishment retrospectively; but the bulk of research finds that being a parent, while it is happening, does not increase life satisfaction and may reduce it.

Those who look to parenthood as a solution to their discontent will typically find that the rewards, though real, are some years in the future.

insisted on comparing upward, which is the worst thing you can do. As Richard Layard writes, "One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.

Now I couldn't care less. I just feel like I can write what I want to write, but don't feel I have anything to prove anymore. I think it's very much internal. I don't care about how others judge me.

I felt lack of inspiration. What is it at the end I was trying to achieve? Is it a promotion? Is it validation? Is it a great piece of work on TV? It kind of lost its meaning.

I have begun looking for sources of joy elsewhere, and dialing back my career's presence in my mind.

I think there must be more to life than answering emails at midnight and five in the morning.

What if I had become a chronically dissatisfied person?

becoming better off economically seemed to make people less satisfied.

richer people were happier than poorer people, but getting richer didn't make a country happier.

bird might think he deserves to swim as well as a fish, but if he sits moping on the riverbank instead of using the wings God gave him, the fox is going to eat him. "Your brother would rather have his own way than be happy. He's thrown away the grace he was given because it's not the grace he had in mind." The Truthspeaker paused to reflect on that. "There's not much hope for a person who won't live in the grace he's given." ***

Follow your passion. Nothing - not wealth, success, accolades or fame - is worth spending a lifetime doing things you don't enjoy.

Make space in your life for the things that matter, for family and friends, love and generosity, fun and joy. Without this, you will burn out in mid-career and wonder where your life went.

A society in which there are high levels of voluntary activity will simply be a better, happier place than one where there are not.

If a prediction comes true it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes true it has failed.

We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment. But that surely must be wrong. Life alone is only half a life. One spent pursuing the satisfaction of desire is less than satisfying and never all we desire. So it is worth reminding ourselves that there is such a thing as ethics, and it belongs to the life we live together and the goods we share – the goods that only exist in virtue of being shared.

The consumer society, directed at making us happy, achieves the opposite. It encourages us to spend money we do not have, to buy things we do not need, for the sake of a happiness that will not last.

I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.