Quotes About Contentment

We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.

I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.

I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

If you are satisfied, you bring your satisfaction to the moment and fill the circumstances of your life with that satisfaction. If you are dissatisfied, however, no one and nothing can produce contentment for you.

To each their own. One must live each day so that there are no regrets.

I'll never believe that money is everything.

Desire persuades us that if only we have a pleasant breath or if only we have that spacious feeling we had earlier, then we would be happy. But desire is insatiable. As soon as we get the object or experience we have been longing for, we move on to another desire, because the more we pursue desire, the more desire we experience.

It is what it is and it's okay. I'll be okay, you'll be okay, and the world will keep turning.

A man's homeland is wherever he prospers.

One's country is wherever one does well.

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

It is better to rise from life as from a banquet - neither thirsty nor drunken.

Happiness is prosperity combined with virtue.

And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.

Love and passion are well and good while they last, but in the end what mattes is whether you like the person you are with. Friendship and companionship matter more. They are the things that last. And if in the end we learn to be friends, I will be content.