Coventry Patmore Quotes

Happiness is brief. It will not stay. God batters at its sails.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

All forms of human happiness contain within themselves the seeds of their own decomposition.

This world's a bubble.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

Everything is an illusion; that is the whole thing about it - illusion, immitation, a mirage. It makes me too sad. Its having like a good dream, you know you are going to wake up.

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

Having a fantasy come true doesn't always mean it will be permanent.

Life and death are nothing but the mind. Years, months, days, and hours are nothing but the mind. Dreams, illusions, and mirages are nothing but the mind. The bubbles of water and the flames of fire are nothing but the mind. The flowers of the spring and the moon of the autumn are nothing but the mind. Confusions and dangers are nothing but the mind.

Fond man! the vision of a moment made! Dream of a dream! and shadow of a shade!

Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.

I've been given an amazing opportunity and I could not be more grateful. But I also know that all this will eventually die off. It's not real. It will go away and then you'll go away and then, I don't know, I'll be left sitting in some English hotel room.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

Baseball, while you're doing it, you think it's going to last forever.

As for success, I don't care for it. It is a fragile thing.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Happiness is fleeting - I think that's the main lesson I have learned.

When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away.

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it's happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience.

People still don't appreciate how ephemeral success is.

Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.