Quotes & Sayings About Immediate Gratification

Many are attracted to social service - the rewards are immediate, the gratification quick. But if we have social justice, we won't need social service. — Julian Bond

They found that some emotionally involved brain structures were highly activated by the choice of immediate or near-term rewards. These areas were associated with impulsive behavior, including drug addiction. In contrast, when participants opted for longer-term rewards with higher return, lateral areas of the cortex involved in higher cognition and deliberation were more active.18 And the higher the activity in these lateral areas, the more the participant was willing to defer gratification. — David Eagleman

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We delude ourselves if we believe that skilled behavior is easy, that it can come about without effort. We forget the years of tuning, of learning and practice it takes to be skilled at even the most fundamental of human activities: eating, walking, talking, reading, and writing. It is tempting to want instant gratification - immediate expert performance and experiential pleasure - but the truth is that this primarily occurs only after considerable amounts of accretion and tuning. — Donald A. Norman

It means being able to resist the urge for immediate gratification and opt for the course of action that will pay off later. — Ann Landers

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. — Clayton Christensen

Revenge is the capitalism of the poor: conserve the original wound, defer immediate gratification, fatten the first insult with new insults, invest and reinvest spite, and ke waiting for the perfect moment to strike back. — Aravind Adiga

To be a climber one has to accept that gratification is rarely immediate. — Bernadette McDonald

I always try to keep a positive perspective on what's valuable and the importance of restricting that immediate gratification and, most importantly, that who you are isn't the stuff you have. — Demi Moore

We live in a time of instant everything, courtesy of the electronic highway. It creates a community of toddlers. When they don't get immediate gratification, they get petulant and sulky. — Faye Kellerman

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written. — Mark Strand

The benefits to the mother of immediate breastfeeding are innumerable, not the least of which after the weariness of labor and birth is the emotional gratification, the feeling of strength, the composure, and the sense of fulfillment that comes with the handling and suckling of the baby. — Ashley Montagu

You'll not find the life God intended for you in relationships seeking immediate and personal gratification - even the — Tony Dungy

It's often suggested that as a culture, we're only interested in immediate gratification. Fast food. Self-checkout. Downloadable music, movies, books. Instant coffee, instant rebates, instant messaging. Instant weight loss! Shall I go on? — Stephanie Perkins

Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely - yet not entirely - forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Patience expands your options. If you insist on immediate gratification, your choices are severely limited. — Ralph Marston

Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain. — Charles F. Glassman

Our commitment should be to leave our environment in better shape than when we found it, our nation's fiscal house in better order, our public infrastructure in better repair, and our people better educated and healthier. To indulge in immediate gratification and exploitation is an insult to previous generations, who sacrificed for us, and thievery from the next generation, who depend on our virtue. — Eric Liu

For me, the excitement in architecture revolves around the idea and the phenomenon of the experience of that idea. Residences offer almost immediate gratification. You can shape space, light, and materials to a degree that you sometimes can't in larger projects. — Steven Holl

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification - for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery. — Gustave Flaubert

Immediate gratification is a dream killer. — Bryant McGill

The problem isn't materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences. — Dalai Lama

Look in the mirror, do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you, or do you see John the Savage? If you're a human being, you'll be seeing something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough. — Margaret Atwood

Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification. — Joan Didion

Delayed gratification is making a choice, constantly convincing yourself to hold back and pursuing immediate gain or profit. — Sunday Adelaja

I don't mean to romanticise the struggle, that leads to all kinds of terrible violence and absurdities that are even worse than the perverse immediate gratification. — John Maus

Writing never had the immediate gratification I was looking for. — Paul Shaffer

I'm a sucker for good black skirts and pretty little shirts and kooky tops. I have to admit that shopping satisfies my craving for immediate gratification. — Sophie Ellis-Bextor

The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification - if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well? — David Halberstam

As you'll learn in this book, research shows that human beings are hardwired to choose immediate gratification over benefits we have to wait to receive. Logic doesn't motivate us - emotions do. But there is real science behind the idea that moving our bodies changes our brains in ways that lead to happiness and much more. The benefits that research shows for regular exercise are truly astounding: more energy, better sleep, less stress, less depression, enhanced mood, improved memory, less anxiety, better sex life, higher life satisfaction, more creativity, and better well-being overall. — Michelle Segar

I think we're all hooked, I feel my own hook-ness on immediate gratification you know. I want what I want. — Jeff Bridges

Appealing to emotions, immediate gratification, and passivity of the American public is enabling a sicker society. — Melissa Cady

Theatre is immediate gratification. — Chita Rivera

I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives. I'm not talking about the short-term gratification of pleasures like sex, drugs or gambling (though I'm not knocking them), but something that will bring true and lasting happiness. The kind that sticks. — Dalai Lama XIV

The world conspires against our souls by blinding us to the depth and glory of their God-given design and tempting us to be satisfied with immediate gratification. — John Ortberg

Giving up on our long-term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination. — Dan Ariely

The distant threat of eternal damnation pales in comparison to the immediate gratification of corrupting young skin. — Laura Wiess

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one's impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification. — Marcel Proust

In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted. — Bat For Lashes

Immediate gratification takes too long. — Carrie Fisher

As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You'll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there's an art to mending. If you're careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth. — Elizabeth Berg

Immediate gratification of a live audience makes me come alive. I miss performing in theater. I'll make my return to the stage eventually. — Brendan Dooling

Side by side with the miseries of underdevelopment ... we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which involves so much throwing away and waste. — Pope John Paul II

It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence that all precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but by our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards that shall be obtained in another state. — Samuel Johnson

The great thing about kids is the immediate gratification. As soon as I get home from touring, my wife and kids become my life. There is nothing sweeter. — Scott Weiland

For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively ... — Selma Fraiberg

The only thing I miss from the sitcom format is that immediate gratification of when you're, if we're talking about comedy, of the live audience. — Ray Romano

To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. — Neil Postman

People invite me to dinner not because I can cook, but because I like to clean up. I get immediate gratification from windex. Yes, I do windows. — Carol Burnett

The parks used to be described on maps as the Upper Pleasure Gardens and Lower Pleasure Gardens, but some councillor or other force for good realized the profound and unhealthy implications of placing 'Lower' and 'Pleasure' in such immediate proximity and successfully lobbied to have 'Lower' removed from the title, so now you have the Upper Pleasure Gardens and the mere Pleasure Gardens, and lexical perverts have been banished to the beaches where they must find such gratification as they can by rubbing themselves on the groynes. — Bill Bryson

Patience is a godly attribute that can heal souls, unlock treasures of knowledge and understanding, and transform ordinary men and women into saints and angels. Patience is truly a fruit of the Spirit. Patience means staying with something until the end. It means delaying immediate gratification for future blessings. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person. — Aristotle.

o prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. — Neil Postman

Accustomed to the calm aspects of things, she turned, instead, toward the more tumultuous. She loved the sea only for its storms, and greenery only when it grew up here and there among ruins. She needed to derive from things a sort of personal gain; and she rejected as useless everything that did not contribute to the immediate gratification of her heart, - being by temperament more sentimental than artistic, in search of emotions and not landscapes. — Gustave Flaubert

In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term grown, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our high nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance. — Steven Pressfield

People aren't photographing for history any more. It's for immediate gratification. If you're photographing to share an image, you're not photographing to keep it. — Larry Towell