Abraham Lincoln - Heath Byers - William Shakespeare - Aesop - Epicurus - John Keats - Horace - Socrates - Swami Sivananda - Mohammed - Thomas C Haliburton - Alain de Botton - Leo Tolstoy - Death of a Salesman 1985 - Red Dwarf TV - John Milton -
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure. Abraham Lincoln
Contentment is next to impossible when one gazes upon the reckless abuses of Earth. Heath Byers
He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get. William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors I ii 33-34, Antipholus re Syracuse
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
Be content with your lot. One cannot be first in everything. Aesop
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for. Epicurus
In pale contented sort of discontent. John Keats, Lamia
How is it, Maecenas, that no one lives contented with his lot, whether he had planned it for himself or fate has flung him into it, but yet he praises those who follow different paths? Horace, Satires
Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates
He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Socrates
There is no end of craving. Hence contentment alone is the best way to happiness. Therefore acquire contentment. Swami Sivananda
The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach. Lin Yutang
Patience is the key to contentment. Mohammed
Contentment is after all simply refined indolence. Thomas C Haliburton
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice. Alain de Botton
If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Biff: Are you content?
Happy: Hell no. Death of a Salesman 1985 ***** starring Dustin Hoffman & John Meldovich & Stephen Lang & Kate Reid & Charles Durning & Louis Zorich et al, director playwright Arthur Miller
You call this happiness? Surrounded by toadying lackeys and paid sycophants, living with a love-goddess-sex-bomb-model-megastar. You call this contentment? Red Dwarf s3e5: Timeslides, Rimmer to Lister, BBC 1989
In solitude
What happiness? who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find? John Milton, Paradise Lost 8:364