#contentment

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

"Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived."

"We're all golden sunflowers inside."

"[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."

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

"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."

"You don't have to be part of a couple to be happy, you know."

"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"

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The midsummer sun shines but dim, The fields strive in vain to look gay; But when I am happy in Him December's as pleasant as May."

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

"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."