Quotes About Contentment

Human life when rightly lived is simple ... but it is not rightly lived while it is bound to a complexity of lusts, desires, and wants -- these are not the real life but the burning fever and painful disease which originate in an unenlightened condition of mind.

Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.

She had done as much as possible to create a stable, gloriously dull life for herself

La felicidad cabe en tres principios, a cuál más simple: vivir en el presente, valerte solo de ti mismo para ser feliz y permanecer impasible ante la adversidad.

Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher? No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.

Happiness, or contentment, comes from where we look and what we believe, not from what we have.

Self-seeking breeds loneliness; self-forgetfulness breeds fullness.

Chocolate and wine and fun weekend are delightful gifts indeed, and God is glorified when we partake with joy and gratitude. But viewing these blessings as necessities is self-indulgent. If we demand them as rights, they will enslave us, evaporating the delight and glory they were meant to convey. No one actually needs a spa day or wine or chocolate or even a vacation.

Contentment does not lie around the next corner. It is not waiting for us on the other side of today's difficulty, nor is it lost with yesterday. Contentment is where God is, and God is with us today.

We will never find contentment—freedom from that angry feeling of unfairness—by getting the things that are rightfully ours. We will find it by letting go of our entitlement to them.

Our problem really isn't that we need something we don't have; our problem is that we don't find God to be enough for us.

I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do?

Filled with the joy of love, I gave up sadness.

So what I think at this point is that I'm aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

If I am playing a board game with people close to me and we are happy, I must be sure we don't quarrel before the end of it. I must be sure that at some later time we don't play another board game that is unhappy. I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often. I should add them up, now and then: what are my happy memories so far?

For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that was needed was a room for her.

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.

Ouça, Virgínia, é preciso amar o inútil. Criar pombos sem pensar em comê-los, plantar roseiras sem pensar em colher as rosas, escrever sem pensar em publicar, fazer coisas assim, sem esperar nada em troca. A distância mais curta entre dois pontos pode ser a linha reta, mas é nos caminhos curvos que se encontram as melhores coisas.

It is true that wisdom has wealth in the one hand and pleasure in the other, that her ways are ways of pleasantness, her paths are paths of peace; but she will never come to one who follows her for the sake of the wealth in the one hand or the pleasure in the other.

The lovers of beauty must unite in a league, and carry out some great propagandist work through the country. They must demand the extermination of the bulldog and the dismantling of the cheap villa, both of which are responsible for a deal of our contentment amid ugliness.

We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.

In the words of George Valliant, the study's pioneer, there are two pillars to happiness: one is love; the other is finding a way of coping with life that doesn't push love away. Earning more does make you happier, but love makes you happy.

Would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy?

Joy doesn't exist out in the world somewhere. Joy is an inside job.