Quotes About Contentment

A little in one's own pocket is better than much in another man's purse. 'Tis good to keep a nest egg. Every little makes a mickle.

A little in one's own pocket is better than much in another man's purse.

The satisfied, the happy, do not live; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.

Conque tu hermano Lázaro —me decía Don Manuel— se empeña en que leas? Pues lee, hija mía, lee y dale así gusto. Sé que no has de leer sino cosa buena; lee aunque sea novelas. No son mejores las historias que llaman verdaderas. Vale más que leas que no el que te alimentes de chismes y comadrerías del pueblo. Pero lee sobre todo libros de piedad que te den contento de vivir, un contento apacible y silencioso.

La envidia es mil veces más terrible que el hambre, porque es hambre espiritual.

No os quepais en el cerebro lo que os puede caber en el bolsillo. Y al contrario, ¡no os quepais en el bolsillo lo que os puede caber en el cerebro!

Los ricos siempre se encariñan, cuando son ricos, por el lugar donde antes han sido pobres. Parece ser esta la mejor manera de demostrar su cambio de posición y fortuna y el más viable procedimiento para sentirse felices al ver que otros que eran pobres siguen siendo pobres a pesar del tiempo.

El ahorro, cuando se hace a costa de una necesidad insatisfecha, ocasiona en los hombres acritud y encono.

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.

One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.

This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.

Yet even if their advice were to work, what would be the result afterward in the unlikely event that one did turn into a slim, well-loved, powerful millionaire? Usually what happens is that the person finds himself back at square one, with a new list of wishes, just as dissatisfied as before. What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives. In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don't work.

A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.

As many a thinker since Aristotle has said, everything we do is ultimately aimed at experiencing happiness. We don't really want wealth, or health, or fame as such-we want these things because we hope that they will make us happy. But happiness we seek not because it will get us something else, but for its own sake.

If Diogenes with his lantern twenty-three centuries ago had difficulty finding an honest man, today he would have perhaps an even more troublesome time finding a happy one.

while personal income in the U.S. more than doubled between i 96o and the 19gos in constant dollars, the proportion of people saying they are very happy remained a steady 30 percent. One conclusion that the findings seem to justify is that beyond the threshold of poverty, additional resources do not appreciably improve the chances of being happy.

while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.

But as soon as these basic problems of survival are solved, merely having enough food and a comfortable shelter is no longer sufficient to make people content. New needs are felt, new desires arise. With affluence and power come escalating expectations, and as our level of wealth and comforts keeps increasing, the sense of well-being we hoped to achieve keeps receding into the distance.

Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The

Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so.

What would really satisfy people is not getting slim or rich, but feeling good about their lives. In the quest for happiness, partial solutions don't work.

And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.