Quotes
Quotes about Discontent
Restlessness and discontent are the necessities of progress.
The discontented man finds no easy chair.
The rich adopt novelties and become accustomed to their use. This sets a fashion which others imitate. Once the richer classes have adopted a certain way of living, producers have an incentive to improve the methods of manufacture so that soon it is possible for the poorer classes to follow suit. Thus luxury furthers progress. Innovation "is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public. The luxury today is the necessity of tomorrow." Luxury is the roadmaker of progress: it develops latent needs and makes people discontented. In so far as they think consistently, moralists who condemn luxury must recommend the comparatively desireless existence of the wild life roaming in the woods as the ultimate ideal of civilized life.
If we devote our time disparaging the products of our business rivals, we hurt business generally, reduce confidence, and increase discontent.
Our pleasures and our discontents, Are rounds by which we may ascend.
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
To fly from, need not be to hate, makind: All are not fit with them to stir and toil, Nor is it discontent to keep the mind Deep in its fountain. - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1818.
I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
Discontent is something that follows ambition like a shadow.
Restlessness is discontent - and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man - and I will show you a failure.
And poets by their sufferings grow,-- As if there were no more to do, To make a poet excellent, But only want and discontent.
However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as "the most anti-social and evil of all passions.
If we devote our time disparaging the products of our business rivals, we hurt business generally, reduce confidence, and increase discontent.
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York; And all the clouds that lowered upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.
