Enduring Satisfaction Quotes

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

A garden was one of the few thing in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

Too often we concentrate only on the things we can see now; but our focus should be on that place we can only envision, but will enjoy for all eternity.

How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.

When people are still getting pleasure from something that you did 30 years ago, it makes you feel good. I always say it makes an old man happy.

The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make.

Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.

Marriage has, for its share, usefulness, justice, honour, and constancy; a stale but more durable pleasure. Love is grounded on pleasure alone, and it is indeed more gratifying to the senses, keener and more acute; a pleasure stirred and kept alive by difficulties. There must be a sting and a smart in it. It ceases to be love if it has no shafts and no fire.