Quotes About Contentment

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

We are richer than we think, each one of us.

Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.

It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.

He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. 'Thank God!' we say,' those illusions are gone.' Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.

Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments.

Uno de los principales inconvenientes del amor, al menos durante un tiempo, es que corre el riesgo de hacernos felices.

We may be happy with little when we have come to expect little. And we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to expect everything.

A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.

Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

On the one hand, we may try to achieve more; and on the other, we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve.

Those among us who chose to stay single should not be thought un-Romantic. Indeed, we may be among the very most Romantic of all, which is precisely why we find the possibilities open to us especially unappetising. It's in the end the fervent Romantics who should be especially careful of ending up in mediocre relationships: relationships best suit the kind of people who don't expect too much from them.

Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

When does a job feel meaningful? When we can, at the end of the day, feel as if our work has in some way, however modestly, helped either to reduce the misery or to increase the contentment of others.

We cease to appreciate things when we believe that life should be perfect and we can eradicate all known problems.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectability of existence

The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary.

To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.