Unrealistic Happiness Quotes & Sayings

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time. — Andrew Weil

It is unrealistic, I think - and by "unrealistic" I mean it is a demand that cannot be met - to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn't make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children, I think, suffer - in a way that adults don't always realize - under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy, which is the pressure not to make their parents unhappy, or more unhappy than they already are. — Jennifer Senior

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy. — Adam Phillips

Fear is caused by the uncertainty of the future. Sorrow is caused by the remembrance of the past. Try to keep your thoughts in the present, for the future we will never know and the past we may never understand. — Jeffrey Fry

My friend Isabel says, When you're writing even a short novel, with at least a couple of subplots, and God only knows how many characters, your brain holds the volume of it beyond the ability of your consciousness.
Of course. — Sarah Manguso

Charles's conversation was as flat as a sidewalk, and everyone's ideas filed along it in their ordinary clothes, exciting no emotion, no laughter, no reverie. He had never been curious, he said, when he lived in Rouen, to go to the theater and see the actors from Paris. He did not know how to swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and he could not explain to her, one day, a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

But shouldn't a man know everything, excel at a host of different activities, initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all its mysteries? Yet this man taught her nothing, knew nothing, wished for nothing. He thought she was happy; and she resented him for that settled calm, that ponderous serenity, that very happiness which she herself brought him. — Gustave Flaubert

just glanced towards the door, with a slight movement of the head, and then returned to my book. He immediately withdrew. This was better than if I had answered with more words, and in the passionate spirit to which my first impulse would have prompted. What a good thing it is to be able to command one's temper! I must labour to cultivate this inestimable quality: God only knows how often I shall need it in this rough, dark road that lies before me. In — Emily Bronte

What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper: Some liken it to climbing up a hill, Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour: For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper," To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust. — Lord Byron

I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness: "I don't want to read anything else that you write." "Why?" She thought about it. "Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing. — Elena Ferrante

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, Never, Never, Never, Never! Pray you, undo this button. — William Shakespeare

Youre a rich man, why arent you smart? — Jacque Fresco