#contentment

Life is perphas after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is perculiar and inexplicable. We are constanly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment. ↗

— Anne Giardini

#life #start-over #change

...I should always find, the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on one hand, or by hard labor, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life... ↗

— Daniel Defoe

#philosophy-of-life #diet

Ari smiled. The sun was shining, the weather was great, he was eating ice cream, and all his dreams were about to come true. ↗

— James Patterson

#dreams

Happy the man, whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air In his own ground. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#dream #home #land #not-my-life #dreams

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough. ↗

— Aleksandar Hemon

#desire #life #life

I have come to feel that the essence of life is not what it so often seems to be - working to have, working to get, working to possess. It's about becoming. It's about what's happening inside us. ↗

— Mary Ellen Edmunds

#life

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. ↗

— Criss Jami

#contentment #dictator #honest #humble #humility

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#contentment #familiarity #habit #long-term-relationships #love

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#contentment #diligence #generosity #service #usefulness

If all I had was all that money could buy, I'd be bankrupt!" EL ↗

— Evinda Lepins

#contentment #money #money