Quotes About Contentment

The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him.

Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.

Depend on it, there is no surer road to unhappiness than always having our own way.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

We ate simply, we were healthy, and we were uninterested in those things that should be called possessions not because they are possessed but because they possess. Those ten years were the happiest of my life save the first ten, the years in which I had neither position nor success, and no one took notice of me. Those were the years of the parent holding the child in his arms, lifting him high in the air, and pulling him close. As I held my own son, when he was a baby, God was right there.

I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I'm grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion.

You don't want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don't want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it.

Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.

We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.

Better a bird in hand than hell knows what in the bush.

Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one's joy is to steal.

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out of the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you.

So, if you can, give up the want of another and be who you are, and more often than not, love will come at the precise moment you are simply loving yourself.

But when we believe that only what we want holds the gold, then we find ourselves easily depressed by what we lack. Then we are pained by what we perceive as the difference between here and there, between what we have and what we need.

I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

Comparison is the death of joy.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet

But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple.