#happiness

Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression. ↗

— Paulo Coelho

#limits #oppression #sadomasochism #sex #sexuality

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something. ↗

— Michael Haneke

#artists #create #enormous #enough #fears

The desire of intimacy is the desire to share one's innermost self with another ↗

— Dan McAdams

#art

Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#death #happiness #death

I want that. I want that awful intense and serious unhappiness, cos then I might feel better, and then I might be happy. ↗

— David Thewlis

#happiness #sadness #death

In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

#joy-of-life #joy-of-seeing #painting #life

How could I have been so blind as to want a soul? It was laughable now, to think that a soul could live inside me without being tainted by the centuries of blood and evil and death. The voices agreed, laughing at me, mocking my quest. I didn’t deserve a soul; I didn’t deserve happiness, or peace. Why should I get my happy ending, when I’d left a swath of horror and destruction behind me wherever I went? ↗

— Julie Kagawa

#deserve-happiness #death

When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself. ↗

— Roger Housden

#death

It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years’ time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal. ↗

— Neel Burton

#happiness #immortality #meaning #time #death

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history. ↗

— Albert Camus

#happiness #history #misery #death