discontentment

There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.

Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.

He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand.

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure.

The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in __he Book of Disquiet_ of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. __ suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real _ only then do I find myself comforted.

Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.

What men classify as living is often but the discontentment of making oneself itch just to enjoy the scratch.

What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one__ mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before__hat the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished__f it were possible to wish__ou could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.

Reality. It is sometimes brought through foreign eyes; because if you do not know any better, you cannot see the worse (and vice versa).

You must have a level of discontent to feel the urge to want to grow.

It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.

Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.

You wander. You work nearly every job known to man, it seems, only to arrive at the wonderings of philosophy.

Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.

Discontent comes from two sources alone: Not having dreams, or not pursuing the ones you have. No one has ever died sorry who tried to turn a wish into a memory.

People on the spiritual path are people of unquenchable discontent. It is being propagated that spirituality means contentment. Contentment means you have contented yourself with what you have. A spiritual person means he is unwilling to settle for anything less than the Ultimate.

It was not desirable for the paroles to have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.