#contentment

"Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough"

"You have to open up to the world and learn optimism...Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim."

"I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances."

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."

"We're all golden sunflowers inside."

"Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness."

"In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart."

"And besides . . . I don’t want to leave you. Er, you guys.”He smiled, and it lit up his whole face. “Well, ‘we’ are certainly happy to hear that. Oh, and I’m also happy to watch our darling little love child dragon while you’re in St. Louis.”I grinned back."

"It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it."

"Inventory:"Four be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye."

"You will never get everything in life but you will get enough."

"Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come."

"Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home."

"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."

"The ultimate story of success: When a nobody, who has never once in his entire life known the feeling of being remembered or respected, suddenly snaps and becomes a world dictator. On one hand it sounds just, but on the other, it illustrates the reason why a prosperity message has and needs its limitations."

"Imagination doesn't always make you long for what you cannot have, but rather thrive in what you do not have."

"Ultimate prosperity is one's value within. It takes a man of depth, morality, and charm to be envied yet without a sign of wealth or romance. A passion to prove such inner worth is his permission to achieve whatever he desires."

"When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth."

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."

"Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude."