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"There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."
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Exlpore more Contentment quotes
"To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Edith Wharton
"That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities, now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way."
"Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats."
"You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!"
"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."
"A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature."
"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."
"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore."
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