Quotes About Contentment

Two jobless grown-ups, we spent weeks wandering around our Brooklyn brownstone in socks and pajamas, ignoring the future, strewing unopened mail across tables and sofas, eating ice cream at ten A.M. and taking thick afternoon naps.

Not that love is a competition. But I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.

Don't sweat the small stuff, it's all small stuff. If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time. Enjoy life—no one gets out of here alive. Don't worry, be happy.

I thought we would be the most perfect union: the happiest couple around. Not that love is a competition. But I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.

That was the day I felt gooder about myself than I'd ever had. I hadn't been much

Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.

As the late afternoon sun shone in Shaw's face and a soft flower-scented wind cooled him, his unhappiness turned to a detachment that was not at all unpleasant. He was utterly alone in the world. This knowledge thrilled him.

No man ever knows when he is happy; he can only know when he was happy.

Zuviel kann man wohl drinken, Doch trinkt man nie genug.

She's my friend, the boy said simply. That's who she is and that's enough for me. As Minli looked at the buffalo boy, aglow with happiness against his poor surroundings, she saw it was enough for him. More than enough, as the smile that kept curling up on his face told her.

Fortune was not a house full of gold and jade, but something much more.

He's satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can't be satisfied.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room.

He had thought that home was something one possessed, but the things one had possessed were cursed with change; it was what one didn't possess that remained the same and welcomed him.

And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his, his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy, if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness

Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears.

It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else, an absolute ignorance.

If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures — you had to kill yourself among the graves.

When you reach a certain age you don't care about the future: it is success enough to be alive: every morning you wake with triumph. (p. 91)

When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness.' It wasn't what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.