We talk a lot about peace, understanding, and joy around here because I believe they are central to simple living and cozy life. I’ve long collected quotes and today I’ve assembled some around the idea of living a peaceful and joyful life. I’ve grouped them by themes related to living life peacefully and joyfully. I hope you find some that encourage and challenge you today.

Quotes About Living a Happy Life

A well-spent day brings happy sleep.
Leonardo da Vinci

It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.
Margaret Bonnano

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Winston Churchill

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
Oliver Wendall Holmes

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I had realized it sooner.
Colette

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder

Quotes About What We Do Each Day

The feeling that “if nothing is happening, nothing is happening” is the prejudice of a superficial, dependent and hollow spirit, one that has succumbed to the age and can prove its own excellence only by the quality of pseudo-events it is constantly organizing, like a bee, to that end.
Vaclav Habel

Probably the greatest malaise in our country today is our neurotic compulsion to work.
William McNamara

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
Lin Yutang

What you do every day should contribute to giving your life meaning. If it doesn’t, why are you doing it?
Don Hutcheson

Quotes About Walking Peacefully With God

Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. No one can hinder him.
A. W. Tozer

God doesn’t always smooth the path, but sometimes he puts springs in the wagon.
Marshall Lucas

If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it, you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.
D. L. Moody

I never remember a period that I ever sincerely and patiently sought to know the will of God by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, through the instrumentality of the Word of God, but I have been always directed rightly. But if honesty of heart and uprightness before God were lacking, or if I did not patiently wait upon God for instruction, or if I preferred the counsel of my fellow men to the declarations of the Word of the living God, I made great mistakes.
George Mueller

In God’s sight there are no little people and no little places. Those who think of themselves as little people in little places, if committed to Christ and living under His lordship in the whole of life, may, by God’s grace, change the flow of our generation.
Francis Schaeffer, No Little People

Better to love God and die unknown than to love the world and be a hero; better to be content with poverty than to die a slave to wealth; better to have taken some risks and lost than to have done nothing and succeeded at it.
Erwin W. Lutzer

Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise Physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires. Let us trust his skill and thank him for his prescription.
Sir Isaac Newton

Quotes About Money

Annual income, twenty pounds; annual expenditure, nineteen pounds; result, happiness. Annual income, twenty pounds; annual expenditure, twenty-one pounds; result, misery.
Charles Dickens

Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.
Benjamin Franklin

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
Isaac Newton

He is richest who is content with least.
Socrates

Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own nature.
Teddy Roosevelt

Buy straw hats in the wintertime. Summer will surely come.
Bernard Baruch

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living in your means.
Calvin Coolidge

Quotes About Perfectionism & Procrastination

Do the next thing.
Unknown

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
Theodore Rubin

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasent. Accomplished, they are full of blessing, and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us. Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility, and hindering our communion with God. If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink, go straight up to it, and do it at once. The only way to get rid of it is to do it.
Alexander MacLaren (1826-1910) Scottish Preacher