Quotes About Contentment

I had never thought of settling down. I had started believing I was always going to live alone. Marriage was the last thing on my agenda.

To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.

It is a wonderful, moving, heart-filling experience to sit with the man or woman you love and your beloved children and know that all are happy to be just where they are with each other and loving one another. This doesn't happen very often.

I live way below my means.

My philosophy is to live below your means.

I don't care if I ever fight for the belt or get the belt.

When Thoreau says, "it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished," this is waving a red flag in front of a bull for go-getting, progress-oriented people. But who is to say that his realizations of one morning spent in his doorway are less memorable or have less merit than a lifetime of busyness, lived with scant appreciation for stillness and the bloom of the present moment?

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are. Perhaps its value lies precisely in this. Maybe we all need to do one thing in our lives simply for its own sake.

No matter what people are doing, they are much less happy when their minds are wandering than when their minds are focused

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. It all ties in. It's not a real option for me as a

There really is no place to go in this moment. We are already here. Can we be here fully? There really is nothing do to. Can we let go into non-doing, into pure being? There really is nothing to attain, no special "state" or "feeling," because whatever you are experiencing in this moment is already special, already extraordinary, by virtue of the fact that it is being experienced.

We imagine that one or two big things will have a profound effect [on our happiness]. But it looks like happiness is the sum of hundreds of small things….The small stuff matters.

Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.

At such moments something resembling happiness actually stirs in your chest, but it isn't the sort of emotion you want to lean on very hard.

Maybe, I think, I don't have to be great at this; maybe I just have to be good enough.

But if he pitied himself in those last difficult hours–because he was so young, because he was alone, because his body had betrayed him and his will had let him down– it's not apparent from the photograph. He is smiling in the picture, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes. Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God.

We should be like dogs.

There was a picture of Votto standing by his pool, smiling, the sun in his eyes—Life is beautiful. Joe looked at the picture. Then he went out to a hardware store and picked up a new hammer.

I wish I knew the flavor of my happiness.

Listening to him, I realized how lucky I was not to have had a wonderful childhood. Those who do, or those who peak in their early years, have only that remembered joy or strength to tide them over the rest of their lives. Nothing could ever be as good as that time; for them nothing ever is.

Debemos optar por permanecer en el interior del paraíso del pasado el mayor tiempo posible o volver a nuestro anodino presente en el que, por lo general, las únicas cosas que anhelamos son el fin de semana, nuestro programa de televisión favorito, un sexo mediocre de vez en cuando, o ir a dormir por la noche?

Live life as it was meant to be lived. Half asleep, preferably. [...] She preferred [...] to go to sleep at once, sleep now being one of the very few aspects of existence for which she felt any degree of enthusiasm [...]