Quotes About Contentment

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is in being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release...

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.

Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude itself upon their notice.

Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;

La felicità è come una farfalla: se l'insegui non riesci mai a prenderla, ma se ti metti tranquillo può anche posarsi su di te

I felt as if it were better, or not worse, to have compressed my enjoyments and sufferings into a few wild years, and then to rest myself in an early grave, than to have chosen the untroubled and ungladdened course of the crowd before me, whose days were all alike, and a long lifetime like each day.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble imbue of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.

Despite all her misgivings and regrets, she was "determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be, for I have . . . learnt from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances; we carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wherever we go.

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.

Satisfaction, for us, is only a brief thing. The man who acquires wealth does not reach a point where he has enough. Success for us is more like acceleration than speed. Interest cannot be maintained at a constant level.

And he thinks that if his soul had a form, this is what it would be. A baby sleeping in his arms.

Better to be numb than plagued by longing for something that could never be.

The illusion of purpose is critical to a well-adjusted population.

I don't want to be empty on the inside.

If love of money is the root of all evil, then having money is the root of all boredom. When you can have everything, you find there's nothing you really want. When you can do anything, you find there's nothing you really care to do. You become lazy. Life feels like a boulder you don't want to lift.

There was never anything wrong with my life. Perhaps that was the problem... The crack in my life was the fact that I had everything I wanted, or could ever want—and when you have it all, boredom grows like a fungus, coating everything you own and everything you feel.

The hiss of waves breaking at her ankles is a gentle sigh, as if the sea itself has found lasting contentment.

True solace can be worth it's weight in gold.

It will never happen for them, but somehow he's content in knowing that in some other place and time it would have. He holds her for ten seconds, twenty. Thirty. Then she slips away, and he returns to the dining hall. In a few minutes he hears her playing, the strains of her music pouring forth, filling Happy Jack with the upbeat, pulse-pounding sound track of the damned.

Once you've found paradise, why go anywhere else?