Contentment - christiansquoting.org.uk

Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the things I cannot, and a great big bag of money. Unknown Author Aged 13

If you cannot get what you like, why not try to like what you get?

Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.... Spanish Proverb

The contented person is never poor-the discontented is never rich.

I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.- Paul of Tarsus, Phil. 4:11-13

Content thyself to be obscurely good.
When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,
The post of honour is a private station.-- Joseph Addison

The contented person is never poor-the discontented is never rich.The quantum of wantum remains constant. -Samuel Beckett

Gold can no more fill the spirit of a man, than grace his purse. A man may as well fill a bag with wisdom, as the soul with the world.-- Robert Bolton

Bad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is leading, with the thoughts he is thinking, with the deeds he is doing; when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is still, in spite of all, the child of God.... Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

A little is as much as a lot, if it is enough. --Steve Brown

Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God's wise and fatherly disposal in every condition. -- Jeremiah Burroughs

Contentment in every condition is a great art, a spiritual mystery. It is to be learned, and to be learned as a mystery.-- Jeremiah Burroughs

Bloom where you are planted.--- Nancy Reader Campion

Agur said, "Give me neither poverty nor riches"; and this will ever be the prayer of the wise. Our incomes should be like our shoes: if too small, they will gall and pinch us, but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip. But wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much, but wants more. True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander. --Caleb C. Colton

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail. --John Donne.

Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress. --Thomas A. Edison

To the discontented man no chair is easy.-- Benjamin Franklin

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor. --Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac, 1749

How few are our real wants! and how easy it is to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.
Julius Charles Hare and Augustus William Hare, _Guesses At Truth_,1827

We shall never be content until man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself. - Jerome K. Jerome (1859 &endash; 1927)

The Fountain of Content must spring up in the mind; and ... he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.-- Samuel Johnson: Rambler #6

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content. --- Helen Adams Keller

To be upset over what you don't have is to waste what you do have. --Ken Keyes, Jr.

This is my motto: Contented with little, yet wishing for more.Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

Next to faith this is the highest art -- to be content with the calling in which God has placed you. I have not learned it yet. -- Martin Luther

It is right to be contented with what we have, never with what we are.-- Sir James Mackintosh

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.--Malcolm Muggeridge

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better. -Florence Nightingale (1820 &endash; 1910)

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.-- Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)In "Dictionary of Quotations," by Bergen Evans, 1968.

Great wealth and content seldom live together. --Bob Phillips

God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. --JOHN PIPER

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.--Pliny the Younger (61-112)

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished. KARL RAHNER

It is so important not to waste what is precious by spending all one's time and emotion on fretting or complaining over what one does not have.
Edith Schaeffer

If the Lord sets you to guard a lonely post in perfect stillness from all active work, you ought to be just as content as to be in the midst of the active warfare. It is no virtue to love the Master's work better than the Master's will. -Hannah Whitall Smith, (1832-1911), letter of 7/16/1886 [M.E. Dieter, ed. CHRISTIAN’S SECRET OF THE HOLY LIFE: UNPUBLISHED PERSONAL WRITINGS OF HANNAH WHITALL SMITH (Zondervan, 1994), p.253]

He is the richest who is content with the least. -Socrates

It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion. Robert Southey

He that deserves nothing should be content with anything. Spurgeon's Proverbs

If I am a son of God, nothing but God will satisfy my soul; no amount of comfort, no amount of ease, no amount of pleasure,will give me peace or rest. If I had the full cup of all the world's joys held up to me, and could drain it to the dregs, I should still remain thirsty if I had not God.... G. A. Studdert Kennedy, The Wicket Gate [1923]


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