Quotes About Contentment

Take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough.

We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that makes our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment. MERLE SHAIN

I can be satisfied by small steps—in fact, very satisfied.

Unfold your days with me and lose your sense of panic and loss. This earth is abundant. It holds joy for you, and contentment. Bring me your restless heart. Allow me to gentle your soul.

What gives us true joy?

the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we make a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make the changes that you suggest.

Our bodies hummed with contentment.

Une maison sans chat, c'est la vie sans soleil!" ("A house without a cat is like life without sunshine!")

As Therese Asche used to say "A house without a cat is like a day without sunshine.

Happiness doesn't come easily, just because you want or even deserve it, she said. I don't think you're too young to know that. So you've got to find your own way to let that happiness in. Sometimes, when it threatens to get away from you, you have to reach out the window and pull it in, like capturing a bird.

Is it 'good' to go on doing the same old oblivious thing, to still enjoy it no matter what? Does perseverance steady the world?

I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him. Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?

It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.

Every day is Sunday"—that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it?

Isn't there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?" "Like?" "Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?

If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

Try as I could—which wasn't very hard—I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.

Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness

Una vez dijo que para ser feliz había que cumplir tres requisitos previos –ser estúpido, ser egoísta y gozar de buena saludy que él no estaba seguro de cumplir más que el segundo. De modo que discutí, peleé, pero él quería creer que la felicidad es imposible; esta creencia le proporcionaba cierto extraño consuelo.

Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.

Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

the small pleasures and large dullnesses of home.