Buddha Quotes

When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets [rents] it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

Condition de l'homme: inconstance, ennui, inquie tude. Man's condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.

We're always looking for something.

We cannot be satisfied with things as they are. We cannot be satisfied to drift, to rest on our oars, to glide over a sea whose depths are shaken by subterranean upheavals.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Nothing is more certain than that improvement in human affairs is wholly the work of the uncontented characters.

To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear.

Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.

I'm constantly trying to figure out my life and what's next. I'm never satisfied with what I have.

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

You have to give up some of the old so that you can make room for the new.

I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn't dropped it, but there's something similar in what I'm trying to say. That once it's been done, you want to go someplace else. There's just some sense of straining.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'.

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.

All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.

No one is ever satisfied where he is.

Desire is wakeful; satisfaction dozes.