Quotes About Contentment

It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our efforts.

We seem to have a fear of empty spaces. The philosopher Spinoza called this a horror vacui. We want to fill up what is empty. Our lives stay very full. And when we are not blinded by busyness, we fill our inner space with guilt about things of the past or worries about things to come.

When we are spiritually deaf, we are not aware that anything important is happening in our lives. We keep running away from the present moment, and we try to create experiences that make our lives worthwhile. So we fill up our time to avoid the emptiness we otherwise would feel.

Nada te turbe, nada te espante. Todo se pasa, Dios no se muda, la paciencia todo lo alcanza, quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Solo Dios basta»3.

While busy with and worried about many things, we seldom feel truly satisfied, at peace, or at home.

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.

We often say, "I am not very happy. I am not content with the way my life is going. I am not really joyful or peaceful, but I just don't know how things can be different, and I guess I have to be realistic and accept my life as it is." It is this mood of resignation that prevents us from actively searching for the life of the Spirit.

The reward of choosing joy is joy itself.

It is hard to bear with people who stand still along the way, lose heart, and seek their happiness in little pleasures which they cling to...You feel sad about all that self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, for you know with an indestructible certainty that something greater is coming.

If God wants to give you more than you are asking, would you rather have what you are asking or what God wants to give?

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

for my greatest skill has been to want but little.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I make myself rich by making my wants few.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.

The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man's abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

If you want to be happy, be!

I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.

Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.