Short-Lived Pleasure Quotes

Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it's also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit - and then it's gone.

But, like all happiness, it did not last long.

Pleasure dies at the very moment when it charms us most.

O what is life, if we must hold it thus as wind-blown sparks hold momentary fire?

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

What win I, if I gain the thing I seek? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?

For me, food and music are very similar in that you create, you spend a lot of time making something, and it only lasts a few seconds or a few minutes.

The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so.

The dream is short, repentance long.

That which has not a real excellency and value in it self, entertains no longer than the giddy Humour which recommended it to us holds.

Happiness that depends mainly on physical pleasure is unstable; one day it's there, the next day it may not be.

A blaze first pleases and then tires the sight.

The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this the progress principle: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.