Quotes About Fulfillment

Let's not forget The Things They Do To Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes - shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semi-autobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

The key to happiness wasn't being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.

You can have everything and feel nothing.

Is happiness the aim?" "I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good

Why want another universe if this one has dogs?

To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.' —Sylvia Plath

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath

How much extra happiness am I acquiring? Why am I wanting so much more than I need? Wouldn't I be happier learning to appreciate what I already have?

The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.

A quark is not the smallest thing. The smallest thing is the regret you will feel on your deathbed for not having worked more.

The hardest dream of all is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.

Want,' she told her, in a measured tone, 'is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.

Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.

Feeling you lack things doesn't make you less complete.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

If one advances confidently,' Thoreau had written in Walden, 'in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,' Thoreau had said. 'Live the life you've imagined.

The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more. We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.

an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness.

She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.

Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.