Quotes About Contentment

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.

I'm so lucky to be having a happy childhood as an adult.

Success is peace of mind in knowing you did your best.

So often we fail to acknowledge what we have because we're so concerned about what we want.

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.

True happiness comes from the things that cannot be taken away from you. Making the full effort to do the right thing can never be taken away from you.

Happiness is in many things. It's in love. It's in sharing. But most of all, it's in being at peace with yourself knowing that you are making the effort, the full effort, to do what is right.

Achievement will continue at the same or a greater level only if you do not permit the infection of success to take hold of you and your organization. The symptom of that infection is called complacency. Contentment with past accomplishments or acceptance of the status quo can derail an organization quickly. In sports or business, getting to the top is difficult. One of the reasons staying there is so rare is because the infection sets in.

My paradise:] This morning, with her, having coffee.

Can you be happy when you are unhappy?

Three days in Prince Charming's company and Agatha softened into the woman she'd been in Assisi. More smiles. Fewer frowns. Not so quick to criticize. She paused in her opinions to consider how they'd strike James. She paused in her eating to cast admiring glances his way. And now there she sat with a rare look of contentment on her face, her smile beaming up at James in the pulpit. Never in his life had Father Finn witnessed so clearly the transforming power of love.

Was it wise of me at all to have confined my career to one small classroom in one small town? Wouldn't I be coming away from my life's work with a higher heart if I hadn't been washing the same blackboard for forty-six years?

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It's akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.

When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.

It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

no place to go, nothing to do, nothing to attain.

Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330:932. § Harvard Business Review. Jan-Feb 2012:88.

To break out of this trap of always being driven by our own desires, it is not a bad exercise to ask yourself from time to time, "What is my own way?" "What do I really want?" "Would I know it if I got it?" "Does everything have to be perfect right now, or under my total control right now, for me to be happy?

If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. WU-MEN

Right in that or any moment of non-doing, you are already OK, already perfect, in the sense of perfectly who and what you are. And therefore, right in that moment you are already at home in a profound way, far beyond who you think you are and the ideas and opinions that may so shape and sometimes severely limit your view of the larger whole.

It's not a matter of letting go—you would if you could. Instead of Let it go, we should probably say Let it be.