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"True contentment... is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare."
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"When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence."

"Savour a slow-paced contented life."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more."

"Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?"

"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."

"I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism."

"Money may buy you the means to a happiness, but it cannot buy happiness itself."

"I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own."

"He is rich that is satisfied."
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos, for man was always small compared to the nearest tree."

"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead."

"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet."

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera and grace before the play and pantomime and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching painting swimming fencing boxing walking playing dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."

"A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality."

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life."

"The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers."
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