Quotes About Contentment

Want, is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem

Querer es una palabra muy curiosa. Querer implica carencia. A veces, si llenamos esa carencia con alguna cosa, el deseo original desaparece por completo. Quizá tu problema no es lo que quieres, sino aquello de lo que careces. Quizá exista una vida que realmente quieras vivir

Dedicamos tanto tiempo a desear que nuestras vidas sean distintas, a compararnos con otras personas , con otras versiones de nosotros mismos... Cuando realmente todas las vidas tienen cierto grado de cosas buenas y cierto grado de cosas malas

You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

Magazines are very popular, despite no human's ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next.

Want,' she told her, in a measured tone, 'is

But since when did taste have anything to do with happiness?

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living.

To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own nonupgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

This biggest and most profound shift happened not be becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa bed and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.

Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn't the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother's parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself.

The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people.

This is everything I wanted, so why am I not happy? So what was Schopenhauer's answer? Well, if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of will.

It is the simplest, purest joy

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.

The sky isn't more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn't sound more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren't better company if you're famous. Pizza tastes good regardless of your job title. The best of life exists beyond the things we are encouraged to crave.

Una podía comer en los mejores restaurantes, tomar parte de todos los placeres sensuales, cantar en São Paulo ante veinte mil personas, recibir chaparrones de aplausos, viajar a los confines de la Tierra, tener millones de seguidores en las redes, ganar medallas olímpicas. Pero nada de esto cobraba sentido sin amor.

Not just in terms of the stuff of modern life, but its values, too. The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people. To feel like we always lack something.

Remember 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.

Puedes tenerlo todo y no sentir nada».

We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter

There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.