Transience of Happiness Quotes

If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

How many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet sooner or later our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were, or where the guilty parties are to be found...they too are the victims of the reality they created.

Wisdom views with an indifferent eye all finite joys, all blessings born to die.

All earthly joy begins pleasantly, but at the end it gnaws and kills.

Ah gentle pair, ye little think how nigh Your change approaches, when all these delights Will vanish and deliver ye to woe, More woe, the more your taste is now of joy.

But nothing in life was set in stone and nothing in life is promised us. Not happiness, not joy, not love. Everything was variable and mutable and inconstant.

There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

In youth alone, unhappy mortals live; But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive: Discolour'd sickness, anxious labour, come, And age, and death's inexorable doom.

If there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!' The jaws of darkness do devour it up; So quick bright things come to confusion.

Pleasures are like poppies spread: You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed.

I'm always sorry when pleasant things end. Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure.

I sighed. "What is life but fleeting moments of happiness strung together on necklace of despair?

Man is never always happy, and very often only a brief period of happiness is granted him in this world; so why escape from this dream which cannot last long?

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

...all enjoyment is dependent upon the frailty of human life and human desires ... if we were to have all we want and to live forever, all enjoyment would be gone.