Quotes About Contentment

Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.

Feeling you lack things doesn't make you less complete.

Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

an ordinary life is not a guarantee of happiness.

She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential.

Feeling you have no time doesn't mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn't mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn't mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven't achieved enough doesn't mean you haven't achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn't make you less complete.

Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

Happiness occurs when you for get who you're expected to be. And what you're expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self acceptance. It's the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.

What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn't need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn't even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before.

otherwise happiness will drip through us like water through a leaky bucket. The moment we want is the moment we are dissatisfied. The more we want, the more we will drip ourselves away.

I am happy here. Why want another universe if this one has dogs?

nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.

We don't have to do everything in order to be everything

Oh, and let's not forget the Things They Do to Make Themselves Happy That Actually Make Them Miserable. This is an infinite list. It includes shopping, watching TV, taking the better job, getting the bigger house, writing a semiautobiographical novel, educating their young, making their skin look mildly less old, and harboring a vague desire to believe there might be a meaning to it all.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence.

Don't spend your life worrying about what you are missing out on. Not to be Buddhist about it—okay, to be a little Buddhist about it—life isn't about being pleased with what you are doing, but about what you are being.

But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.

And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

But we kind of know that turning life into a desperate race for more stuff is only going to shorten it. Not in years, not in terms of actual time, but in terms of how time feels.

Maybe happiness is not about what we can get. Maybe happiness is about what we already have. Maybe happiness is about what we can give. Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net. Maybe there is no certain way to be happy. Maybe there are only maybes. If (as Emily Dickinson said) "Forever—is composed of Nows—," maybe the nows are made of maybes. Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life's beautiful uncertainty.

How to be happy (2) Don't compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don't drown in a sea of "what if"s. Don't clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions.

You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.

Maybe even suicide would have been too active. Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don't even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.