Unattainable Happiness Quotes

You can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

Nobody lives happily ever after, because that is extremely unrealistic.

We never taste a perfect joy; our happiest successes are mixed with sadness.

Distance... is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

Samuel Johnson called it the vanity of human wishes, and Buddhists talk about the endless cycle of desire. Social psychologists say we get trapped on a hedonic treadmill. What they all mean is that we wish, plan and work for things that we think will make us happy, but when we finally get them, we aren't nearly as happy as we thought we'd be.

Once upon a time the world was sweeter than we knew. Everything was ours; how happy we were then, but then once upon a time never comes again.

Happiness is not the portion of man.

Trying to be happy in this world is greatest illusion.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

Happily ever after is a concept I'll never believe in.

We could be happy if the air was as pure as beer.

Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn't going to come.

It is too exhausting to try and make everyone happy or pretend.

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it.

You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

Our idea of happiness, some of it, is very tied to the cult of celebrity: there is this golden, wonderful life that I want, and if I dress like that, I'm on my way there.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

From my own kind I only learn How foolish comfort is

Every body about me seem'd happy but every body seem'd in a hurry to be happy somewhere else.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a little boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.