Quotes About Contentment

I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar

Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a passtime, if we live simply and wisely

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.

A man's riches are based on what he can do without.

Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way...But lo! men have become the tools of their tools...We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk.

There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit until we have so conducted that we feel like new men in the old.

Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit comfortably on your shoulder.