contentment

If you cannot be happy with the little you have, you can be confused with the lot you want to have

When you have a distaste for what is not yours, you have set the stage for what is yours.

Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can__ be replaced by anything else.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

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.

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.

I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not.

Happy the man, whose wish and careA few paternal acres bound,Content to breathe his native airIn his own ground.

Serenity is a very elusive quality. I've been trying all my life to find it.

We had little but we didn't know we had little. It seemed to us that we had much and we were very content.

...not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.

It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.' That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - that only food that any possible universe ever can grow - then we must starve eternally.

You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.

..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

God says only one thing if you want to have attachment towards worldly life; go ahead and get attached to it; or else, get attached to Me. If you get attached to Me, you will get permanent happiness and if you get attached to the worldly life, you will not find contentment!

Better to be happy with the cod fish in your plate now, than to linger for the taste of a tuna that is still swimming in the sea.

I don__ want content. I want slight fear. Anxiety. I want a longing devotion for a twist of absence. The feeling of complete isn__ quite pleasing.