Discontentment Quotes

“You must have a level of discontent to feel the urge to want to grow.”
― Idowu Koyenikan, Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“Man was born for society. However little He may be attached to the World, He never can wholly forget it, or bear to be wholly forgotten by it. Disgusted at the guilt or absurdity of Mankind, the Misanthrope flies from it: He resolves to become an Hermit, and buries himself in the Cavern of some gloomy Rock. While Hate inflames his bosom, possibly He may feel contented with his situation: But when his passions begin to cool; when Time has mellowed his sorrows, and healed those wounds which He bore with him to his solitude, think you that Content becomes his Companion? Ah! no, Rosario. No longer sustained by the violence of his passions, He feels all the monotony of his way of living, and his heart becomes the prey of Ennui and weariness. He looks round, and finds himself alone in the Universe: The love of society revives in his bosom, and He pants to return to that world which He has abandoned. Nature loses all her charms in his eyes: No one is near him to point out her beauties, or share in his admiration of her excellence and variety. Propped upon the fragment of some Rock, He gazes upon the tumbling waterfall with a vacant eye, He views without emotion the glory of the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

“If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”
― Montesquieu

“Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Her face felt like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want--I want--I want--was all that she could think about--but just what this real want was she did no know.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before–that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The tedium of existence and feeling imprisoned in a deplorable job can cause a person to consider the most expedient escape route from suffering including flirting with suicide. Fernando Pessoa wrote in “The Book of Disquiet” of his own feelings of uneasiness and sense of discouragement. “I suffer from life and from other people. I cannot look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten, and lost, with no connection to anything useful or real – only then do I find myself comforted.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Discontent is the nagging of the imagination. Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: "Not this.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living / A Toolkit for Modern Life

“It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Boredom and ineffective attempts to escape tedium are the perpetual lot of humankind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our greatest limitation isn't the leader of the lives; it is the spirit within us.”
― John MacArthur

“It was not desirable for the proles to have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Discontent comes from two sources alone: Not having dreams, or not pursuing the ones you have. No one has ever died sorry who tried to turn a wish into a memory.”
― John Kramer, Blythe

“He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Disquietude that springs from the fundamental nature of being a human being is vaster and more encompassing than depression, which has a cause and therefore a cure.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom in one majestic chorus”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are responsible for our own moral being. Shame and guilt spring from discontent with our morality and leading a wasteful life. A person whom rejects societal notions of success, does not believe in a merciful god, and is shunned by the same people whom he studiously avoids, is left with very little to steady their life except for moments of solitude to contemplate the aesthetic purpose of their being. We reaffirm the value of personal existence by working on self-improvement and dedicating our life to achieving purposeful goals.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“When discontentment begins to settle in your heart, turn a "have to" attitude into a "get to" attitude, and it will elevate your ability to press in and learn to love what needs to be done, regardless of how you feel. "I don't have to __________; I GET to.”
― Jen Schmidt, Just Open the Door: How One Invitation Can Change a Generation

“It seems that we are distracted because we are always in search of something better. We always want to see a different place or a different person’s life, as ours passes us by. We don’t pay attention to our own lives, therefore we want someone else’s. In a way, this is the definition of our social media feed. I want your life; please ‘like’ mine and tell me that it’s good enough. The thing is, most of us live the life that we are searching for. We just aren’t aware enough to see it. We are half present, therefore half appreciative, and our relationships suffer because of it.”
― Eric Overby

“Az elégedetlenséget, igaz, már mint ifjú is a tehetség lényegének és legbelső valójának tekintette, és miatta zabolázta meg és hűtötte le az érzést, mert erről tudta, hogy hajlandó beérni a könnyelműen odavetett, félig-meddig bevégzett tökéletességgel. Vajon most a lebéklyózott érzelem bosszulta meg magát azzal, hogy cserbenhagyta őt, hogy megtagadta a szolgálatot, s nem volt hajlandó segíteni és szárnyalóvá tenni művészetét, s a forma és kifejezés minden örömét, boldogságát megtagadta tőle?”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“It was not desirable for the paroles to have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Money isn’t everything. The same is true of the lack of it.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Outside, a brisk wind churned the wind chimes on the porch into a forbidding cacophony of discontent.”
― Kiran Manral, Missing, Presumed Dead

“Over time marked with periodic starvation and after enduring a life lacking in wholesome personal habits, a person learns how to harness the effervescence of hope and organize the contemptuous sneer of discontentment.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“We way more often pray because we want something we do not have than we pray because we have something we do not want.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“She knew that she should feel discontentment, connected to a large chain of disenfranchisement or systemic persecution--it's not that black death and the news of the world didn't touch her spirit--but she was somewhat ashamed to say, in therapy or publicly, that the bulk of her discontentment came from having very little about which to be discontented.”
― Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People

“Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage,
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The toenail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telescope at one end of his beat,
And at the other end the microscope,
Two instruments of nearly equal hope,
And in conjunction giving quite a spread.”
― Robert Frost, West-Running Brook

“When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage however, that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.”
― Lawrence Sterne