Quotes About Contentment

That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.

you are so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband …

God be praised for His mercy! I have seen a little sunshine-- I have had a happy time.

Some people in my position would now have felt rather crestfallen, and would have begun to think that they had made a very foolish mistake. Not the faintest misgiving of any kind troubled me. I did not feel in the slightest degree depreciated in my own estimation. And even now, after a lapse of three hours, my mind remains, I am happy to say, in the same calm and hopeful condition.

Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

Perhaps, in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Yet he was not all unhappy: the peace and quiet which he had never had when sane were his now; Nature had had mercy on him when she made him mad. He caught his sister once weeping as she looked at him, and he could not understand her tears: "Lisbeth," he asked, "why do you cry? Are we not happy?" On one occasion he heard talk of books; his pale face lit up; "Ah!" he said, brightening, "I too have written

Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.

Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom.

I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.

The Creator has given us souls equal to all the world, and yet satiable not even with a world.

Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness.

Seek not to have things happen as you choose them, but rather choose that they should happen as they do; and you shall live prosperously.

Meanwhile the old "laughing philosopher" was cultivating his garden at Ferney; this "is the best thing we can do on earth.

The secret of peace is not to make our achievements equal to our desires, but to lower our desires to the level of our achievements. "If what you have seems insufficient to you," said the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 A.D.), "then, though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.

in both cases the desire for knowledge had ended bliss. Sophisticates

To be happy means to be self-sufficient.

A happy fly If I live Or if I die

And because I am happy, and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury.

I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted.

She was happy. Her father had always told her to make sure and recognise that state when it arrived, and acknowledge it. 'It's like money in the bank, old girl', he would say ...

Maybe this is the answer - maybe this is how to find true contentment - to live your life within confined horizons. To set modest goals, achievable ambitions. Not all of us can manage it, alas.

we have to accept the lives we've lived. Not imagine lives we might have lived.