Quotes About Contentment

Life was just unbelievably happy.

A sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before 'To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.

Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life's greatest secret pleasures.

The other day in prayer I said to God, Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?.

most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment.

But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with thick, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.

Trust me, if you want to complain, you'll always find plenty to complain about, even when fortune appears to be shining her favor upon you.

The chickens look so plump and contented even in death that you imagine they offered themselves up for sacrifice proudly, after competing among themselves in life to see who could become the moistest and the fattest.

The unnecessary and superfluous volume of pure beauty around here is not to be believed. I can pick papayas and bananas right off the trees outside my bedroom window. There's a cat who lives here who is enormously affectionate to me for half an hour everyday before I feed him, then moans crazily the rest of the time likes he's having Vietnam war flashbacks. Oddly, I don't mind this. I don't mind anything these days. I can't imagine or remember discontent.

Life, if you keep choosing it so hard, will drive you to death...allow contentment to come to you

This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and help me always support it. I'm putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials in life.

Trust me, if you want to complain, you'll always find plenty to complain about, even when fortune appears to be shining her favor upon you. But

Look how little I need, Prudence seemed to be saying. Behold my goodness.

People convince themselves that they have been robbed when they have not, in fact, been robbed. Such thinking comes from a wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity - from the belief that the world is a place of dearth, and that there will never be enough of anything to go around.

The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: "My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).

People convince themselves that they have been robbed when they have not, in fact, been robbed. Such thinking comes from a wretched allegiance to the notion of scarcity—from the belief that the world is a place of dearth, and that there will never be enough of anything to go around. The motto of this mentality is: Somebody else got mine.

I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.

Everything- for no reason whatsoever- is perfect.

Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?

It makes me satisfied, Frank," I finally replied. "It's like this: I believe I have a certain darkness within me, that nobody can see. It's always in there, far out of reach. And being with all those different men—it satisfies that darkness.

It was during the war, too, that I learned how to be comfortable sitting alone in a bar or restaurant. For many women, this is a strangely difficult thing to do, but eventually I mastered it. (The trick is to bring a book or newspaper, to ask for the best table nearest to the window, and to order your drink just as soon as you sit down.) Once I got the hang of it, I found that eating alone by the window in a quiet restaurant is one of life's greatest secret pleasures.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.

Elizabeth Gilbert

I was not built only to labor, and then to sleep, and then to labor again the next day--with no pleasure or excitement. There had to be more to life than toil and travail.