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Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor
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Interpretation

What this quote means

True contentment comes from appreciating what you have rather than longing for what you don’t.

This quote suggests that often in life, our true desires are not what we initially think they are. Instead of chasing after what we believe will make us happy, we might find that the things we already have are actually more valuable and fulfilling, especially when we take the time to understand their worth.

Themes

LuckAppreciationContentmentPerspectiveGratitude

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be shared in a discussion about the importance of gratitude in one's life.

More from Garrison Keillor

When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
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Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
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Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
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I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
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When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
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It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
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