Quotes About Contentment

Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.

Al final, la felicidad se mide a partir de la satisfacción que una persona declara sentir sobre su propia vida, y quizá sea más sencillo estar satisfecho con ella si uno tiene dinero, se ciñe a las normas sociales, acomoda sus juicios a lo que diga la iglesia y no se preocupa demasiado por las injusticias.

It's not only "my work"—forgive the pompous phrase—that I bequeath to my survivors but all the mental and sensual pleasures that come with being a living human: sitting in the spring sunshine, feeling the warmth of friends, solving a difficult equation. All that will go on without me. I am content, in the time that remains, to be a transient cell in the larger human super-being.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations. That's a good reminder, right there. If you didn't lose your husband and kids all in one year, smile! You're ahead of the game.

What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time? Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.

Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you're happy and in love and content with your life, you can't remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate.

Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.

Don't you miss it, any of it?' … 'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind.

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one.

don't look for money to buy your life back

she believed material desires were toxic.

It's true. I'm not a happy-on-the-midlist kind of gal.

the secret of happiness is low expectations.