112 Contentment Quotes For Inspiration

In a world constantly pushing us to achieve more and accumulate ever greater heights of success, the simple notion of contentment often feels elusive. Yet, the power of feeling truly content, finding joy in the present moment and appreciation for what we already have, is undeniably profound. This collection of 112 carefully selected contentment quotes is designed to inspire and remind you of the beauty in simplicity and the peace that comes with appreciating life's many blessings. Whether you're seeking a shift in perspective or just a moment of calm, these quotes serve as a gentle nudge towards embracing contentment in your everyday life.

1. “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao Tzu

2. “Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem” - Kahlil Gibran

3. “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

4. “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” - John Stuart Mill

5. “I should be contentto look at a mountainfor what it isand not as a comment on my life.” - David Ignatow

6. “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

7. “We need much less than we think we need.” - Maya Angelou

8. “Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.” - Pearl S. Buck

9. “A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

10. “If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.” - Socrates

11. “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” - Leo Tolstoy

12. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” - Epictetus

13. “Within what is allotted to us, we can have spiritual contentment.” - Neal A. Maxwell

14. “Just tell yourself, Duckie, you're real quite lucky.” - Dr. Seuss

15. “I have learned that to be with those I like is enough” - Walt Whitman

16. “If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease. . . Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.” - Richard Matheson

17. “Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.” - Socrates

18. “We're all golden sunflowers inside.” - Allen Ginsberg

19. “The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.” - Aleksandar Hemon

20. “He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.” - Socrates

21. “All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.” - John Lubbock

22. “Inventory:"Four be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.” - Dorothy Parker

23. “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

24. “If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.” - Noel Langley

25. “I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it.” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

26. “One honest John Tompkins, a hedger & ditcher, Although he was poor, did not want to be richer;For all such vain wishes in him were preventedBy a fortunate habit of being contented.” - Jane Taylor

27. “No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself” - Plato

28. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon.” - Charles M. Schulz

29. “Lord, make me nowAs happy as the field.With flowers enriched...” - Eileen Soper

30. “A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist. ” - Stewart Alsop

31. “(about William Blake)As for Blake's happiness--a man who knew him said: "If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me."And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. ...He burned most of his own work. Because he said, "I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy."...He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ” - Brenda Ueland

32. “And you require no answers", Foamfollower was laughing in his gladness, "You are sufficient to every question".” - Stephen R. Donaldson

33. “Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!” - Ellis Peters

34. “If at eighty you're not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin' and keepin' power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on your way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss - under your breath, of course - "Fuck you, Jack! you don't own me." If you can whistle up your ass, if you can be turned on by a fetching bottom or a lovely pair of teats, if you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from going sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked.” - Henry Miller

35. “I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.” - Pablo Picasso

36. “You say, 'If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.' You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.” - Charles Spurgeon

37. “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.” - Ann Brashares

38. “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

39. “A lonely impulse of delight” - W.B. Yeats

40. “At some point, you gotta let go, and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

41. “She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.” - George Orwell

42. “I exist as I am, that is enough,If no other in the world be aware I sit content,And if each and all be aware I sit content.One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself.” - Walt Whitman

43. “Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky and the clustering stars above seems to impart a quiet to the mind.” - Jonathan Edwards

44. “He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever.” - Anna Godbersen

45. “Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.” - Sinclair Lewis

46. “Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.” - Kevin Kelly

47. “It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were.” - Nicholas Sparks

48. “He brewed his tea in a blue china pot, poured it into a chipped white cup with forget-me-nots on the handle, and dropped in a dollop of honey and cream. He sat by the window, cup in hand, watching the first snow fall. "I am," he sighed deeply, "contented as a clam. I am a most happy man.” - Ethel Pochocki

49. “We never pray against our government or call down curses on them. Instead, we have learned that God is in control both of our own lives and the government we live under. God has used China's government for His own purposes, molding and shaping His children as He sees fit. Instead of focusing our prayers against any political system, we pray that regardless of what happens to us, we will be pleasing to God.” - Brother Yun

50. “In a person's lifetime there may be not more than half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.” - Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

51. “With a philosophy education, one can infuriate his peers, intimidate his date, think of obscure, unreliable ways to make money, and never regret a thing.” - Criss Jami

52. “Ultimate prosperity is one's value within. It takes a man of depth, morality, and charm to be envied yet without a sign of wealth or romance. A passion to prove such inner worth is his permission to achieve whatever he desires.” - Criss Jami

53. “There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

54. “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.” - Haruki Murakami

55. “[F]rom my years of understanding ... I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live [i.e., unmarried], which I assure you for my own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God. From the which if either ambition of high estate offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince ... or if the eschewing of the danger of my enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death ... could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this determination ... yet is it most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present.” - Elizabeth I

56. “We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch "Christian" cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right "worldview" talking points. And we're content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That's precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of "groanings too deep for words" (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.” - Russell D. Moore

57. “Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.” - Alain De Botton

58. “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.” - Plato

59. “It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities that she has, and not by the qualities she may not have.” - Charles Dickens

60. “he who is greedy is always in want” - Horace

61. “The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

62. “You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here!” - Lev Grossman

63. “Health is the greatest possession. Contentment is the greatest treasure. Confidence is the greatest friend.” - Lao Tzu

64. “Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.--” - Robert Murray McCheyne

65. “Happiness is in contentment, gratitude, and love. It is a lifestyle, not a location.” - Ogwo David Emenike

66. “Joy is a deeply felt contentment that transcends difficult circumstances and derives maximum enjoyment from every good experience.” - Swindoll Charles R.

67. “Deep, contended joy comes from a place of complete security and confidence [in God] - even in the midst of trial.” - Swindoll Charles R.

68. “I only seem negative to the fortunate. That's because I show the less fortunate that they aren't less fortunate after all.” - Criss Jami

69. “Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.” - Julian Barnes

70. “I have come to feel that the essence of life is not what it so often seems to be - working to have, working to get, working to possess. It's about becoming. It's about what's happening inside us.” - Mary Ellen Edmunds

71. “Wanting less is probably a better blessing than having more.” - Mary Ellen Edmunds

72. “If God gave you contentment then you would never pursue your life purpose. It is your restlessness that pushes you to take action, change your life and seek more of what you could possibly be.” - Shannon Alder

73. “If you're not content with the small things, then you won't be content with the big things.” - Anthony Liccione

74. “If we cannot be contented with our current lives and possessions, then we are feeding an appetite that no amount of money will ever satiate.” - Breanna Sampson

75. “The midsummer sun shines but dim, The fields strive in vain to look gay; But when I am happy in Him December's as pleasant as May.” - John Newton

76. “Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.” - Henry David Thoreau

77. “I think it's a real gift to be able to say that what's in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.” - Elizabeth Berg

78. “If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't you won't get any.” - Jerome K. Jerome

79. “[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.” - James Robertson

80. “Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.” - J.K. Rowling

81. “Was it possible to do both, to contribute to the world while merely observing it? To be content in the moment, but plan for the future? Could you follow your heart without losing all common sense?” - Holly Robinson

82. “The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.” - P.D. James

83. “My personal opinion is that the neutral position on the mood spectrum—what I called emotional sea level—is nothappiness but rather contentment and the calm acceptance that is the goal of many kinds of spiritual practice.” - Andrew Weil

84. “Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

85. “Gracious Providence, to whom I owe all my powers, why didst thou not withhold some of those blessings I possess, and substitute in their place a feeling of self-confidence and contentment?” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

86. “Happy are those who evolve from within.” - Amit Abraham

87. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

88. “Part of the trick of being happy is a refusal to allow oneself to become too nostalgic for the heady triumphs of one's youth.” - Larry McMurtry

89. “...ambition or contentment? This simple question led me back to a more balanced view of life and put me in touch with the Me I used to know...” - John Geddes

90. “Be not wishing and pining but thankfully content.  For it is a short bridge between wanting and regret."- from "Dimpellumpzki” - Richelle E. Goodrich

91. “Happy the man, whose wish and careA few paternal acres bound,Content to breathe his native airIn his own ground.” - Alexander Pope

92. “What I see especially among the Navajos and the Zunis and the Hopis is a culture of people who have been smart enough to learn a lesson that we're awfully slow to get... They know that being rich doesn't have any damn thing to do with how much money you've got. It's got to do with are you happy and are you content.” - Rachel Dickinson

93. “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.” - Flannery O'Connor

94. “Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-chimes and what not, are some of my happiest memories today. You know, one day, during one of those trips, I sold all my well-thumbed copies of ‘Inside Outside’ to the Tibetan guy who ran the old book store on Netaji Road for seventy rupees, six Tintins and a disarming smile. And all of a sudden, that moment, standing at the corner of Netaji road, I found out who I was.’('Left from Dhakeshwari')” - Kunal Sen

95. “My dad’s contentment is all that matters to me. When he’s laughing, I’m laughing. When he’s happy, I’m happy. I would give up my soul for him. To me, nothing else but his happiness matters.” - Rebecah McManus

96. “Success is meaningless without fulfilment - both begin within” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

97. “People will ask you the question 'how is life treating you?' But my question is 'how are you treating life?' On that your happiness rests” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

98. “We all have a suspicion and hope that we've just been part of something special, something that may eventually change our lives. That no one else knows this makes it seem like we are living with a secret that we would like to share, but can't, sort of like having a superpower that's not come online or being president elect. For the moment, our lives proceed as usual, but within a month, we think, everything will change. It's a frustrating, if exciting, disconnect.” - Rob Lowe

99. “The happier person is one, that acknowledges and accepts life won't get any better than this.” - Anthony Liccione

100. “I was so nearly happy. There remained only a tiny something, something unexplained and inexplicable that buzzed in my ear when the lights were out, like a malarial mosquito.” - Jennie Rooney

101. “I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am.” - George Sand

102. “Sometimes in life there's no problem and sometimes in there is no solution. In this space - between these apparent poles - life flows.” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

103. “Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.” - Leo Tolstoy

104. “We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.” - David Levithan

105. “Imagination doesn't always make you long for what you cannot have, but rather thrive in what you do not have.” - Criss Jami

106. “Just resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be miserable so you can finally be happy. (It's a sound theory if you think about it hard enough.)” - Richelle E. Goodrich

107. “Why is it people will complain, when they have an open door, where they can walk out to and gaze the stars; rather than having a closed door to lock them in?” - Anthony Liccione

108. “There are enough resources in the world for everyone.” - Bryant McGill

109. “Progress and healing involves seeing every person as not so different from ourselves.” - Bryant McGill

110. “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.” - Dennis E. Adonis

111. “The one who finds contentment is truly rich.” - Dillon Burroughs

112. “Instead of living our lives fighting discontentment, striving to gain contentment from things that were never meant to bring contentment… What if we gave it all up for a grand adventure, for a worthy cause, for the Father? Why do we keep searching to find a hole to shove our hearts into when they were meant to be poured out and fill the entire world?” - Katie Kiesler