Quotes about content
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“The total annihilation of divine worship, which we are spreading through Europe. We should not be content with shattering scepters, we must smash idols forever. There has never been more than one step from superstition to royalism.”

Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Bedroom

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

“Oh, you, who are clutching the sickle, give the tree of superstition its final stroke. Do not be content with hacking off the branches. Tear outby its roots a plant with such noxious effects.”

Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Bedroom

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

Tear, Tree

“The fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Estranged Labour, p. 30.

Feeling, Nature

“He who is contented is rich.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

“I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.”

John McAfee (1945) American computer programmer and businessman

Source: on Twitter https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/1316801215083225096, 16 October 2020

Food

“Telling stories through your content whether it's a social media post or a short video takes your brands to the next level.”

Vladimer Botsvadze

“Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are. Yet how easy it is to remember the truth and thus return home: I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 4

Life, Truth, Home, Sense

“So many people are most miserable these days.
The reason they find it so difficult to be happy is that they always view the past to be better than it was, the present dramatically worse than it is, and the future less resolute than it will be.
The idea of happiness is foreign to them.
Is this not something that is innate because babies are born with
"tabula rasa" which refers to the epistemological idea that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. However I don't disagree with the doctrine of Innatism which holds that the mind is born already in possession of certain knowledge.
A smile, for instance is natural and innate!
So it is a combination of the two schools of thought.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Happiness, People, School, Smile

“Even the best thought is not as good as the moment you detach from it. Even the most important content isn't as important as the moment you learn you can do without it. Like a good teacher.”

Joshua Leavitt

Learning, Teachers

“In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
Perennial fashion — Jazz, as quoted in The Sociology of Rock (1978) by Simon Frith, ISBN 0094602204

Star, Sense

“It is my contention that Creativity is as important today in Education as Literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

TED Conference http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html (2006)

Education

“Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Hate, People

“It is not enough to be happy, one must be content.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Miserables

Happiness

“I determine to render more and better service, each day, than I am being paid to render. Those that reach the top are the ones who are not content with doing only what is required of them.”

Og Mandino book The Greatest Salesman in the World

Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Persuasion (1817)
Works, Persuasion
Source: Pride and Prejudice

Learning, Happy

“Be content with what you have and take joy in the way things are. When you realize you have all you need, the World belongs to you.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

World, Way, Joy

“Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which we live, we should therefore be content.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Time, Past

“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Variant: Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and i learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Silence, Learning, Happy

“Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.”

Anthony Trollope book Barchester Towers

Source: Barchester Towers

Change

“For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.”

Iain Pears book The Dream of Scipio

Source: The Dream of Scipio

Time

“But you have to learn to bend a little,” said Clary with a yawn. Despite the story’s content, the rhythm of Jace’s voice had made her sleepy. “Or you’ll break.” “Not if you're strong enough,” said Jace firmly.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Strong, Learning

“He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment.”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

People

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

“Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

People, Knowledge

“Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Nature, Tree, Time

“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 51, B 75
Source: Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Context: Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their unison can knowledge arise.

“Design cannot rescue failed content.”

Edward R. Tufte (1942) American statistician (b.1942) noted for his writings on information design

“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote in Avant et Après, (1903); taken from Paul Gauguin's Intimate Journals, trans. (1923) Van Wyck Brooks [Dover, 1997, ISBN 0-486-29441-2], p. 2
1890s - 1910s

Life, Dreams, Revenge

“No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table—would there be any trace of me?”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Source: The Splinter Factory

Heart

“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Perfection

“I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queen's on thrones, without self-respect and peace.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Men, Happiness, Peace

“In all times, and all countries especially in those countries which are divided within by religious faith, there are always fanatics who will be well contented to be regarded as martyrs.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers

Source: The Three Musketeers

Faith, Time, Country

“It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.”

Carolyn Parkhurst The Dogs of Babel

Source: The Dogs of Babel

Dreams, Color, Sleep, Heart

“I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“The most content people are those who expect nothing, who have ceased to dream.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

Source: The Red Dice

People, Dreams

“You see pictures of Buddha and he’s sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.”

Dave Eggers book Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

Source: Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

God, Peace, Dead

“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Communication

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

Truth, Idea, Learning

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

Happiness, Time

“Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Envy

“I lived in the royal library, among all the books."
"You resided in a… library?"
"Theresuites inside and great balconies that overlooked the city, but yes. I was most content among those shelves, so one night, I simply never left.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Shadow's Claim

Books, Night

“I welcome each new day with a hopeful expectancy that I, too, will rise above the ordinary. For I am not content to live a merely "normal" life or settle for an average existence. No, I am destined for more--much, much more.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Finding Alice

Life, Hope

“Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2, Ch. 23, § 296a
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Source: Counsels and Maxims (The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer)

Books, Time, Reading

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Death

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Children, People, Thinking, Funny

“They say that extroverts are unhappier than introverts and have to compensate for this by constantly proving to themselves how happy and contented and at ease with life they are.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: The Witch Of Portobello

Life, Happiness

“Let the past be content with itself, for man needs forgetfulness as well as memory”

James Stephens book Irish Fairy Tales

Source: Irish Fairy Tales

Memory, Past, Forgetting

“A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Martí : Thoughts/Pensamientos (1994)
Context: A child, from the time he can think, should think about all he sees, should suffer for all who cannot live with honesty, should work so that all men can be honest, and should be honest himself. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.

Thinking

“Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Fear, Suffering

“Upon the whole, a contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 574 (30 July 1714).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

World

“These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-
Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Jungle Book

Source: The Jungle Books

“Don't confuse contentment with happiness…”

Chris Wooding (1977) British children's writer

Happiness

“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 5.
Context: I resolved passionately to reach the spiritual causes of phenomena, and to dominate the material world which I detested by their means. I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.

Sense, Personality

“Contentment and happiness didn't exist in my life for more than a few moments at a time, and they were really only illusionary. There was always something hidden. Lying in wait to spring up and ruin everything.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

Life, Happiness, Spring, Lying

“Justice. There's a thing we shall ever thirst after, and ever be parched. No. We content ourselves with law.”

Robin Hobb book Royal Assassin

Source: Royal Assassin

Justice, Law

“Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.”

Martin Amis book Money

Source: Money

Life, Money, Reading

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

Henry David Thoreau book Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience (1849)

Law

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Perfection

“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 (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

World

“I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.”

Margaret George (1943) American writer

Source: Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles

Love

“Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Dead

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

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Source: Babbitt

World

“Clary stopped wondering about peanut-fish-olive-tomato soup and started wondering what would happen if she dumped the contents of the pot on Isabelle’s head.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

Fish

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 40.
Source: A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Happiness, Heart, Country

“Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

"Thinking for Oneself" http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter8.html <br class="br">Essays

Men, Books, World, Learning

“It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.”

Ford Madox Ford book The Good Soldier

Part Four, Ch. V (pp. 237-238)
Source: The Good Soldier (1915)
Context: It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.
Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people — like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords — broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

People, World

“Heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise.
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been revealed.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

World, Dreams, Thinking

“I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Queen of the Black Coast" (1934)
Source: Conan the Barbarian Omnibus -The Original Stories
Context: He shrugged his shoulders. "I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

Love, Life

“And without Dex in my life, I like to think I could have somehow found contentment. But the truth is, I feel freer with Dex than I ever did when I was single. I feel more myself with him than without. Maybe true love does that”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Love, Life, Truth, Feeling

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) Swiss explorer and author

Source: The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

Life, Sun

“She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Happiness, Sadness

“Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Intelligence, Tree

“A black cat among roses,
phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,
the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight,
contented with perfume…”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Cats, Night

“Thank you, sir, but I am perfectly content being the bride of death.”

Seth Grahame-Smith book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Source: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Death

“Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.”

Alexander McCall Smith book The Double Comfort Safari Club

Source: The Double Comfort Safari Club

Understanding, Joy

“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

People, Learning

“Contented children are valuable, as is the peace that surrounds them.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonKnight

Children, Peace

“The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions—these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

La forme bâtarde de la culture de masse est la répétition honteuse: on répète les contenus, les schèmes idéologiques, le gommage des contradictions, mais on varie les formes superficielles: toujours des livres, des émissions, des films nouveaux, des faits divers, mais toujours le même sens.
"Modern," in The Pleasure of the Text (1975)

Books

“Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from clever art. May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Art, Perfection

“Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

People, Mountain

“Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.”

Tom Robbins Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Love, Memory, For Him, For Boyfriend

“Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Source: The Woman in the Dunes

Happiness, Sadness, Despair

“So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”

Augusten Burroughs (1965) American writer

Source: This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't

Love, Life, Loss

“… surely I could give him--a sort of contentment…

That isn't enough to give. Not for the giver.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

World

“Contentment… has an internal quietness of heart that gladly submits to God in all circumstances.”

Joni Eareckson Tada (1949) American artist

Source: When God Weeps: Why Our Sufferings Matter to the Almighty

God, Heart

“Not having anything around to read is dangerous: you have to content yourself with life itself, and that can lead you to take risks.”

Michel Houellebecq book Platform

Source: Platform

Life, Reading

“Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.”

Jon Stewart book Earth (The Book)

Source: Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race

People, Way, Personality

“If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Thinking, Sense, Personality

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book I, v, 8
The Advancement of Learning (1605)
Source: The Advancement Of Learning
Context: The two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients: the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation: If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.