Contentment quotes
352 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"The happiness which brings enduring worth to life is not the superficial happiness that is dependent on circumstances. It is the happiness and contentment that fills the soul even in the midst of the most distressing of circumstances and most bitter environment."
"I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances."
"My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested."
"Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone."
"A lonely impulse of delight"
"Our content Is our best having."
"If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone."
"Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It's a politics that's at war with the world."
"Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd."
"I have received and I want to give. This is the path to happiness and contentment."
"Man's happiness really lies in contentment."
"To know people is wisdom, but to know yourself is enlightenment. to master people takes force, but to master yourself takes strength. to know contentment is wealth, and to live with strength resolve. to never leave whatever you are is to abide, and to die without getting lost- that is to live on and on."
"If by happiness you mean instead an ordinary contentment, then yes - I'm fairly contented. Not satisfied - contented."
"May you live unenvied, and pass many pleasant years unknown to fame; and also have congenial friends. [Lat., Vive sine invidia, mollesque inglorius annos Exige; amicitias et tibi junge pares.]"
"We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening."
"Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid)."
"Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back."
"She had nothing to wish otherwise, but that the days did not pass so swiftly. It was a delightful visit;-perfect, in being much too short."
"I find it very difficult just to sit. I would love to learn how to do that with contentment."
