Discontent 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

“A man who goes into a restaurant and blatantly disrespects the servers shows a strong discontent with his own being. Deep down he knows that restaurant service is the closest thing he will ever experience to being served like a king.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.”
― Thomas A. Edison, Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison

“Being happy is harder than being discontent. For happiness we have to roll up our sleeves and knock down houses of cards. Because of this exertion, many prefer to abide by ‘fake’ happiness.( " Happiness blowing in the wind. " )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.”
― Keri Hulme

“There is absolutely no worse death curse than the humdrum daily existence of the living dead.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“What if my greatest disappointments, or the aching of this life, is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?”
― Laura Story

“In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.

In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“And since he was seeing more and more people who were unhappy for no apparent reason, he was becoming more and more tired, and even a little happy himself. He began to wonder whether he was in the right profession, whether he was happy with his life, whether he wasn't missing out on something. And then he felt very afraid because he wondered whether these unhappy people were contagious.”
― François Lelord, Hector and the Search for Happiness

“It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“There are two kinds of discontented in this world, the discontented that works and the discontented that wrings its hands. The first gets what it wants and the second loses what it has. There is no cure for the first but success and there is no cure at all for the second. The very worst of my vices and bad habits will abate of themselves if they are brought to an accounting every day.”
― Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World

“There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“As his (C. S. Lewis's) good friend Owen Barfield once remarked, Lewis radiated a sense that the spiritual world is home, that we are always coming back to a place we have never yet reached.”
― David C. Downing, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis

“But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that, in our democracy, government is us.”
― Barack Obama

“But we disposable women have to be realistic in this life, you know. Else we get itchy and discontented and start contemplating the kitchen knife and wondering whether it wouldn't look nicer between someone's shoulder-blades.”
― Jude Morgan, The Taste of Sorrow

“Author sees the "congested idealism" of the generally discontent as reservoir that will support centralized power even while disagreeing with many specific provisions.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“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

“Wrath springs only from thwarted desires. I do not expect anything from others, so their actions cannot be in opposition to wishes of mine. I would not use you for my own ends; I am happy only in your own true happiness.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“I think at the heart of so much restlessness of the day is a spiritual vacuum. There is a yearning for meaningful lives, a yearning for values we can commonly embrace. I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.”
― Bill Moyes

“You don't much like anything, do you?"

"No, nothing," said Anna, smiling her nice fat malign smile.”
― Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

“...no matter how much Theo achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She's taught you that people who shine more lavishly that everyone else seem to be penalized by discontent, as if they're being punished for craving a brighter life. I've been knocked down so many times I can't remember the number plates, she said once.”
― Nikki Gemmell, The Bride Stripped Bare

“Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Tranquility and discontent are games of numbers. Pockets of discontent keep coexisting with pockets of peace. It is only when the former become ubiquitous that the latter is disturbed.”
― R. N. Prasher

“What was she looking for? What did she miss? And why did the world and the weirdness and significance of captives, cats, faces and buildings strike her with fresh surprise daily, as if she had arrived from another time and place, expecting the earth to be much different? We could do anything, and we do this, what we do do.”
― Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower

“There are large segments of the population that have gone from anger as a response to a specific event, to anger as just a way of seeing the world.”
― Brian Mansfield

“Unable to rule the multitude, they endeavour to raise divisions amongst them. One mob is hired to destroy another; a procedure which at once encourages the boldness of the populace, and justly increases their discontent.”
― Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Volume 1: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents / The Two Speeches on America