#fulfillment

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#starving-artist #suffering #writing #writing-process #life

When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage” “Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said. ↗

— K.J. Bishop

#beth-constanzin #desert #desire #fulfillment #gwynn

Men can, of course, be stirred into life by being dressed up in uniforms and made to blare out chants of war. It must be confessed that this is one way for men to break bread with comrades and to find what they are seeking, which is a sense of something universal, of self-fulfillment. But of this bread men die. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#militarism #self-fulfillment #men

There is a deep and natural craving in the human heart that can be satisfied nowhere except in God. Our being in this world is a test, a preparation for the deepest state of spiritual communion. But most of us, suppressing our deepest longings and disdaining God, seek satisfaction from this world. Such a path can lead only to despair. ↗

— Sundar Singh

#nature

Happiness is the real sense of fulfillment that comes from hard work. ↗

— Joseph Barbara

#fulfillment #happiness #hard #hard work #real

By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties. ↗

— Wilhelm Frick

#been #carried #duties #dutiful #duty

Most of us have considerable prosperity in our lives. Often, we are so busy pursuing our unmet desires that we are unable to enjoy all that we already have. Allowing ourselves to really appreciate the prosperity we have created is a big step toward opening to even greater fulfillment. ↗

— Shakti Gawain

#already #appreciate #big #busy #considerable

People want riches; they need fulfillment. ↗

— Robert Conklin

#need #people #riches #want

It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit. ↗

— Denis Waitley

#fulfillment #happiness #pursuit #pursuit of happiness

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or any kind of professional. And by thirty, darkness starts moving in- you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy and successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing for the rest of your life, and you become resigned to your fate... ...I mean, why do people live so long? What could be the difference between death at fifty-five and death at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five? Those extra years... what benefit could they possibly have? Why do we go on living even though nothing new happens, nothing new is learned, and nothing new is transmitted? At fifty-five, your story's pretty much over. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#fulfillment #life #mid-life-crisis #quarter-life-crisis #age