Quotes About Contentment

Cuántas cosas cambiarían si pudiésemos disfrutar de nuestros tesoros tal como son.

De esta combinación letal sale la falsa conclusión: si tenemos todo para ser felices y no lo somos, lo que no funciona está en otro lado, debe de ser la pareja, sin darnos cuenta de que lo aburrido es la rutinaria vida que llevamos. No es un asunto fácil. Cumplir con logros económicos, avanzar laboralmente o escalar en la posición social da cierta satisfacción, pero ese bienestar es superficial.

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

If I could live again - I will travel light, If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn, I'll ride more carts, I'll watch more sunrises...

La lectura debe ser una de las formas de la felicidad y no se puede obligar a nadie a ser feliz.

The I feel a contentment in defeat, I reflected, simply because defeat has come, because it is infinitely connected to all the acts that are, that were, and that shall be, because to censure or deplore a single real act is to blaspheme against the universe.

Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte y creemos anhelar nuestro fin y anhelamos el sueno y la indiferencia. (We mistake peace for death and we believe we long for our end when what we long for is sleep and indifference.)

Sleepless, obsessed, almost joyful, I reflected on how nothing is less material than money, insamuch as any coin whatsoever (a twenty-centavo piece, let us say) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold.

Felices los amados y los amantes y los que pueden prescindir del amor. Felices los felices.

Algunos moralistas razonaron que la posesión de monedas no siempre determina la felicidad y que otras formas de la dicha son quizá más directas.

Pensé: «Me satisface la derrota, porque es un fin y yo estoy muy cansado».

În vremea aceea,c?utam înser?rile,mahalalele ÅŸi nefericirea;acum caut dimineÅ£ile,centrul ÅŸi senin?tatea.

Giuda cercò l'Inferno, perché la felicità del Signore gli bastava. Pensò che la felicità, come il bene, è un attributo divino, cui non devono usurpare gli uomini.

Of all the towns in the world, Geneva seems to be the place where people could come closest to happiness

Uno puede fingir muchas cosas, incluso la inteligencia. Lo que no se puede fingir es la felicidad.

El más pródigo amor le fue otorgado El amor que no espera ser amado (Hem viel de rijkelijkste liefde toe, De liefde die geen wederliefde hoeft.)

Happiness is essentially a gift; we are not the forgers of our own felicity.

The whole good cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. 'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled.

Even the unhappy lover is happier than the nonlover, with whom the lover would never change places. In the fact of loving he has already partaken of something beloved.

No, the contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one's living; it is man's happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God—which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it, but that no one with the least experience could conceivably confuse with the tense activity of the fanatical "worker".

I have never bothered or asked", Goethe said to Friedrich Soret in 1830, "in what way I was useful to society as a whole; I contented myself with expressing what I recognized as good and true. That has certainly been useful in a wide circle; but that was not the aim; it was the necessary result."35

Man is not happy by virtue of his being. Rather, his whole existence is determined precisely by the non possession of ultimate gratification.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.