Quotes About Contentment

We each do the best we can. My best may not be as good as your best, but it's my best. The fact is we know when we are doing our best and when we are not. If we are not doing our best, it leaves us with a gnawing hunger and frustration. But when we do our best, we experience a peace.

I don't think we have souls. I think death is the end. A lot of people can't bear that idea, but I find it a little restful, really. I'm happy not to feel I'm going on. I don't really want to. I think this life has been plenty. It's just about all anybody could take, really. I'm cheerful about the feeling the end will come -- let it come.

Joy is not getting what you want; it's appreciating what you have.

Joy is not getting what you want. It's fully appreciating what you have. And it starts with the basics, like water.

The healthiest, holiest, and happiest people on the planet are those who laugh at themselves the most.

It's not about success and failure. It's not about good days and bad days. It's not about wealth or poverty. It's not about health or sickness. It's not even about life or death. It's about glorifying God in whatever circumstance you find yourself in.

When God blesses you financially, don't raise your standard of living. Raise your standard of giving.

The ancient sages understood that the good life needed to be more than just survival, that perfect health and many years to enjoy it was as real a satisfaction as could be found,

Are we rich?" "We're comfortable." He sometimes said things like that instead of yes or no. That's how lawyers answer questions.

Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land.

Her secrets to longevity: Do not be jealous or angry, take walks, do not stress about life, and live in gratitude. She is a wealthy woman, rich in love, meaning, and purpose. And she has no ailments except a slow thyroid and a little arthritis.

Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is rich, inspiring, and restful; replete with space and possibility. Loneliness is empty, pathetic, and enervating; bereft of power and potential. Lonely people expect others to fill their inner void, whereas lovers of solitude—which is what I invite you to become on this journey—recognize that time alone is precious, a refuge where you can practice meeting yourself in the mirror of the blank page.

being, of living, and of dressing, the pleasures and the wants of yesterday are to him the pleasures and wants of tomorrow. Rich or poor, he puts on every morning the same woollen cloth, and lays it aside only when he has worn it entirely out, in order to purchase another

The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.

If you write for money or fame you will be disappointed. If you do so for the love of it, you will be rich in satisfaction.

An old man who's happy not to have cowshit on his neck.

And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are. — Mark Strand, from "Lines for Winter," Selected Poems . (Knopf September 26, 1990)

There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

But the comfortable life is a slippery slope toward the consumer life.

instead of purifying my character I was multiplying my wants.

We can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order." He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that "the essence of civilization [is] not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.

How do you find happiness?" Anna paused, then said, "You start by looking right around you for the blessings you have.

Sometimes happiness comes to us. But usually you have to seek it out.

It's all I really want—happiness, every day for the rest of my life. Sometimes happiness comes to us. But usually you have to seek it out.