A Quote by George Gissing

I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask? — © George Gissing
I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?
I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.
Be contented with whatsoever is; never ask for more. The moment you ask for more you have asked for hell. The moment you ask for more you have asked for misery. The desire for more creates misery.
I've been thinking about happiness-how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that, it's a moment of happiness. Almost every day contains at least one moment of happiness.
Ask not of me, love, what is love? Ask what is good of God above; Ask of the great sun what is light; Ask what is darkness of the night; Ask sin of what may be forgiven; Ask what is happiness of heaven; Ask what is folly of the crowd; Ask what is fashion of the shroud; Ask what is sweetness of thy kiss; Ask of thyself what beauty is.
The belief that happiness has to be deserved has led to centuries of pain, guilt, and deception. So firmly have we clung to this single, illusory belief that we've almost forgotten the real truth about happiness. So busy are we trying to deserve happiness that we no longer have much time for ideas such as: Happiness is natural, happiness is a birthright, happiness is free, happiness is a choice, happiness is within, and happiness is being. The moment you believe that happiness has to be deserved, you must toil forevermore.
Happiness, like health, is probably also only a passing accident. For a moment or two the organism is irritated so little that it is not conscious of it; for the duration of that moment it is happy. Thus a hog is always happier than a man, and a bacillus is happier than a hog
And most importantly, ask more from yourself! This is the real key. Ask what you can do to help. Ask what you have to offer. Ask what you can contribute. Ask how you can serve. Ask yourself how you can do more. Ask your spouse how you could be more helpful, loving or kind.
When you ask for happiness and a beautiful life, ask not just for you, but for everyone. When you ask for something better, ask not just for you, but for everyone. By all means ask for abundance and health for you, but also ask for it to be given to everyone. Can you imagine what would happen if six billion people asked for these things for you?
Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing...but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise.
There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.
The moment that you give gratitude is the moment that you find happiness. The moment that you lose gratitude your happiness will vanish and slip through your fingers
Self-knowledge is only from moment to moment, and therefore there is a creative happiness from moment to moment.
But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future.
Please stop waiting for a better and more appropriate time to become happy and focus on the moment you live in. Happiness is not an arrival, it is the journey itself. Many people seek for happiness above the height of human beings, some below. Yet, happiness is exactly at the exact height of human beings.
Right now a moment of time is passing by!... We must become that moment.
True conformity to the dictates of nature requires reverence for the past and solicitude for the future. 'Nature' is not simply the sensation of the passing moment; it is eternal, though we evanescent men experience only a fragment of it. We have no right to imperil the happiness of posterity by impudently tinkering with the heritage of humanity.
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