Quotes About Contentment

Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people's company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did." Tess replayed these words in

I'd come home but nearly everybody does. It's the ones that don't go home that I feel sorry for, they're not happy.

I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for.

She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, she thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future. While most older people believed that they lay in the past.

She was grateful life could be long.

The moment contained all her best hopes and desires. She needed and wanted very little: to be able to gaze upon his face every day for the rest of her life. The place did not matter, nor the conventions of church vows or family alliances or noble ties. He was her love, completely and utterly. As he sank down into her, Meghan gave a little sigh like a moan of surrender but it was not that. It was a sigh of peace, of completion, of a joining that made whole her world.

Así, quieto y ausente, estoy bien. En el color blanco encuentro el reposo. Déjame dormir. Déjame flotar. Sólo quiero navegar en las aguas insípidas del olvido.

I really am a woman at peace.

Wanting everything seems like an excellent way to set yourself up for disappointment. But what if you accept the yearning, what if the yearning is the only thing that can satisfy?

If you do have a job you like, if you're happy in life, you don't need those materialistic things to make you happy," he says.

when you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything. You can build a big career. You can build a big family. And you can meander along a Maryland creek on a weekday morning because the day is too wild and beautiful to stay inside.

people were happiest when they were completely absorbed in activities that were difficult but doable, to the point where their brains no longer had space to ruminate about the troubles of daily life.

if you were offered $400 million to never do the stuff of your work again, would you be bummed about it, despite your riches? If you would, then it's time to ask a follow-up question. If you did land a windfall, and could still do the stuff of your job, what parts of your job would you change? Given that you'd never have to work a day in your life, what would you do more of and what would you shove off your plate?

They found that people were happiest when they were completely absorbed in activities that were difficult but doable, to the point where their brains no longer had space to ruminate about the troubles of daily life.

What makes you happy when it comes to money? Write these categories down and keep them in your wallet, or wherever you pay bills.

When it comes to time, the perfect is a disarmingly subversive enemy of the good.

when you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything.

Fill bits of time with bits of joy. This was an exercise from Chapter 8. Make lists of things that make you happy or that you find meaningful, and that take 30 minutes or less, or even less than 10 minutes.

Despite the usual reputation of self-help, the truth is that most self-help readers already have their lives together. People pick up books on time management because their lives are good, and yet they can see in that goodness that there is space for even more wonder.

In a world where everything could be bought, begged, borrowed, or stolen, it was too incredible to think that this could not.

You know you found the right one when you stop looking for "more.

It's hard not to be happy when you're eating a big steak.

I figure if I have my health, can pay the rent and I have my friends, I call it 'content.'