Category: CONTENTMENT

  • Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

    —Epicurus

  • Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode;

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so. Was I capable of being happy in general? That’s the kind of question, I think, that is best not asked.

    Serotonin: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

  • He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others. At the time his words seemed to me strange, and I did not understand them; but by degrees this became a conviction with me, without thinking about it. He revealed to me a whole new world of joys in the present, without changing anything in my life, without adding anything except himself to each impression in my mind. All that had surrounded me from childhood without saying anything to me, suddenly came to life.

    Family Happiness
    Leo Tolstoy

  • If I’m not able to enjoy the life I have today, I will not enjoy the imaginary life that I have in mind, because God has granted me the moment to enjoy what he has for me at that moment.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • “Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.”

    Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
    Susan Cain

  • An ordinary person is concerned with his own comfort, even if it comes at the expense of others. But a person with values finds true rest when he toils for the sake of making others comfortable.

    To him, the meaning of rest is providing comfort to other people, not to himself. He believes rest is that of his conscience, not of his body.

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Characteristics of the Spiritual Path

  • Besides, with love one can live even without happiness.

    Notes from the Underground
    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • “Beware of passionate attachments to the world. Although they deceive you with peace and comfort, they are so fleeting that you do not notice how you are deprived of them, and in their place come sorrow, longing, despondency, and no comfort whatsoever.”

    —St. Leonid of Optina