Quotes About Contentment

We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.

So long as there is desire or want, it is a sure sign that there is imperfection. A perfect, free being cannot have any desire.

Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want

When I'm married I want to be single, and when I'm single I want to be married.

I wouldn't run for President. I wouldn't want to move to a smaller house.

The River... It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together!

I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it cant have.

I finally learned to live in the present and focus only on what I want rather than what I don't want.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

Is this the time to receive money and clothing, olive groves and vineyards, sheep and cattle, and male and female servants?

true peace is found in the heart that carefully remains in God's daily provision and love.

It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.

Deep in midlife I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special; wanting to be better; wanting to experience every possible adventure in this life; wanting to be, as we have sometimes said at Kripalu, an "expanded self." Oh, for God's sake. It is just too damned much work to be an expanded self. Couldn't I just be an ordinary self?

My two containers, my two soul friends, had come together. I could barely contain my joy. Life was intertwining in wonderful ways.

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

The great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton encountered precisely the same spiritual exhaustion partway through his life. The chief source of this exhaustion, he writes, "is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling

She was a woman who had retained the simplicity of earlier life even as she had surpassed its limitations.

A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.

I was calm, no one wants the kind of calm I was.

But happiness is no respecter of persons.

Happiness is no respecter of persons.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

Having a great intellect is no path to being happy.