Quotes About Satisfaction

There was hardly anything left of that huge lunch but greasy fingers and a crackle of anise between the teeth. The wine bottle was empty. "Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

breathed with relief and finished setting

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn't thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn't bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn't have been like her not to respond. But the thank-you might have been automatic, sent even in the presence of continued suspicions. It could even have been duplicitous, intended to lull Harry into thinking she was satisfied when in fact the opposite was true.

There aren't many things we humans need to do. We need to eat, we need to drink, we need to make love. And the French attitude is, okay, we should do those things very well.

I would stare at the statue's distant shape, perhaps daring it to do something—strike me down if it wanted, or show some other sign of sentience—and, after an uneventful interregnum, I would turn away, never with satisfaction. The statue seemed to mock me with its muteness and its immobility, as though offering the promise, if of anything, not of redemption, but rather of a reckoning, and at a time of its choosing, not of mine.

Art's underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction.

To Love Is To Be Happy With

Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.

people with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores.

On the contrary, it's a way to make sure that you can continue to experience pleasure. What's the point of great meals, great wines, and great blouses if they don't make you feel great?

So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.

But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.

Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.

So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity.

Learning to accept "good enough" will simplify decision making and increase satisfaction.

Social scientist Alex Michalos, in his discussion of the perceived quality of experience, argued that people establish standards of satisfaction based on the assessment of three gaps: "the gap between what one has and wants, the gap between what one has and thinks others like oneself have, and the gap between what one has and the best one has had in the past.

the dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status.

to be satisfied with our work, we typically need a belief in the purpose of what we do. Amy

WE'VE SEEN THAT AS THE NUMBER OF OPTIONS UNDER CONSIDERATION goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down.

Clearly, the cumulative opportunity cost of adding options to one's choice set can reduce satisfaction. It may even make a person miserable.

As a result, individuals with "nonreversible" marriages might be more satisfied than individuals with "reversible" ones. As we see reversible marriages come apart, we may think to ourselves, how fortunate the couple was to have a flexible attitude toward marital commitment, given that it didn't work out. It might not occur to us that the flexible attitude might have played a causal role in the marriage's failure.

The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.