J. B. Priestley Quotes

But prosperity without a soul is like a corpse whose heart has stopped beating. There is no life, only consumption.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

In this regard, pleasure is an event; happiness is a process. Pleasure is an end point; happiness is the journey. Pleasure is material; happiness is spiritual. Pleasure is self-involved; happiness is outer- and other-involved.

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.

I think, before I had money, I believed that money would solve my problems, that it would give me power and I wouldn't have financial stress anymore, and it would completely change my life. And then, when I had money, it changed a lot of things, but it didn't change the way I felt inside at all.

The word contentment comes from the word content, which is what we hold inside - love, value, a feeling of a life that has meaning or purpose, a cause greater than yourself that you're a part of. These are the things that bring true happiness. As a culture, I think we need to redefine what it means to be happy.

More wealth doesn't fix your life. More wealth makes you more of what you already are.

Money doesn't buy happiness. It buys great hookers - but not happiness.

I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

The definition of success is getting many of the things money can buy and all the things money can't buy.

Life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.

The modern world has created airports and hospitals and put 10,000 songs in our pocket. It has built gleaming buildings and computers and advances and innovations that blow our minds. But we have soul, and spirit, and consciousness, and the modern world hasn't done so well at helping us name and understand what it means to be thriving and fully alive with a full heart.

Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition. Your qualifications are not your life.

It is not being out at heels that makes a man discontented, it is being out at heart. To be contented is to be good friends with yourself.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality.

There is a plain distinction to be made betwixt pleasure and happiness. For tho' there can be no happiness without pleasure--yet the converse of the proposition will not hold true.--We are so made, that from the common gratifications of our appetites, and the impressions of a thousand objects, we snatch the one, like a transient gleam, without being suffered to taste the other.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

Success is not just money in the bank but a contented heart and peace of mind.

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.

I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger advances, more prizes. It's a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt.

Your hands may be full of money and your brain full of information but if your heart is empty, your life is very empty.

I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances.

Money's the solution, curing all the ails of the nation. But what about the hearts of man?

All that you need in order to have total happiness, fulfillment, and love in your life you already have right now, whoever you are, wherever you are.