#contentment

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

— Mark Twain

#contentment #friends #friendship #life #friendship

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. ↗

— Dale Carnegie

#contentment #happiness #inspirational #life #attitude

So we strive for perfection in the areas in which we can control, and that isn't necessarily what provides contentment and joy for ourselves and, more importantly, for our children. ↗

— Sarah Jessica Parker

#children #contentment #control #importantly #joy

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. ↗

— J. Maarten Troost

#escapism #happiness #paradise #travel #wanderlust

One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment. ↗

— Merle Shain

#contentment #days #learns #more #often

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#cring #fables #greed #poverty #sorrow

Because one believes in oneself, one doesn't try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn't need others' approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#contentment #perception #self-acceptance #self-assurance #self-confidence

Real poverty is when hunger pangs force from my mind all thoughts but those of food. Real poverty is when the children are not dressed warmly enough for winter. Real poverty is when the housing we can afford is not adequate to the needs of our families. On the other hand, real poverty is - equally - when I have eaten so much that I am uncomfortable, and again, my thoughts center on food. Or when I have so many clothes that I have to spend a lot of mental energy making choices among them or finding ways to store them. Or when, regardless of my living conditions, I am discontent and brooding about how to have more. Real poverty is when material things are uppermost and pressing - whether because we have too few or too many of them. It is poverty, because the human mind and spirit are made for higher things, worthier pursuits. ↗

— Maxine Hancock

#poverty #prosperity #wealth #equality

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. ↗

— Jennifer Crusie

#optimism #positive-thinking #optimism

A book of verses underneath the bough A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness And wilderness is paradise now. ↗

— Omar Khayyám

#love #paradise #poetry #love