Lao Tzu quotes on happiness rarely use the word. The Daodejing, eighty-one chapters probably compiled in the fourth or third century BCE, contains no instance of 喜, the ordinary Chinese term for gladness. What it offers instead is 知足, knowing when you have enough, a phrase confined to chapters 33, 44 and 46. Legge’s 1891 translation states chapter 33’s line plainly: “He who is satisfied with his lot is rich.” The book is a manual for stopping, not for feeling good.
The text is usually called the Daodejing, or Tao Te Ching in the older romanisation: 81 short chapters, about five thousand characters in the received version. Nobody knows who wrote it. The Laozi it is named after may be one person, several, or a useful fiction, and the Daodejing as we have it reads like a compilation rather than one sitting. What matters for quoting is that it is short, numbered and stable, which is why almost every claim about it can be checked in a minute.
In this collection of 20 passages about enough, each entry gives you the chapter it comes from, the Chinese line, the English with its translator named, a reading of what the passage argues, and one thing to do with it this week. Three chapters supply the doctrine. The other seventeen describe the forces that make it hard to keep.
20 Lao Tzu Quotes on Happiness and Contentment
1. Rich Means You Have Stopped Comparing
Source: Tao Te Ching 33 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 知足者富。
“He who is satisfied with his lot is rich; he who goes on acting with energy has a (firm) will.”
Meaning: Eight short verdicts sit in a row and wealth is the fifth, after knowing others, knowing yourself, overcoming others and overcoming yourself. That placement is the argument: 富, rich, arrives as a rung rather than a summit, and it is defined by a judgement about what you already hold. 知足者富 is four characters and no verb for having. Being rich here is not a balance. It is a verdict somebody reached and stopped revising.
Life Lesson: Work out the figure that would count as enough this year, and write it down before the year decides for you. Then look at it whenever a new target appears.
2. Discontent Is the Calamity, Not Poverty
Source: Tao Te Ching 46 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 祸莫大于不知足，咎莫大于欲得。故知足之足，常足矣。
“There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition; no calamity greater than to be discontented with one’s lot; no fault greater than the wish to be getting. Therefore the sufficiency of contentment is an enduring and unchanging sufficiency.”
Meaning: Horses come first. In a well-run world the swift warhorses are sent back to haul dung carts; in a bad one they breed in the border fields, and only then does the chapter name the fault. Contentment is being sold here as a brake on an appetite that raises armies. The last sentence turns it into a definition: the sufficiency of sufficiency is the only kind that holds, because every other kind depends on the next delivery.
Life Lesson: Before adding a goal this month, name the one it replaces. If nothing gets dropped, the month was already full.
3. Shame Is the Bill for Not Stopping
Source: Tao Te Ching 44 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 故知足不辱，知止不殆，可以长久。
“Who is content / Needs fear no shame. / Who knows to stop / Incurs no blame. / From danger free / Long live shall he.”
Meaning: Legge put this chapter into rhyme, which is why almost nobody quotes him for it: his verse runs to 21 words across 6 lines where the Chinese has 12 characters in three clauses. Before the verse he asks three questions, fame or life, life or goods, gain or loss. The answers separate two verbs that English merges. 知足 is about the appetite. 知止 is about the action. You can feel that you’ve had enough and still fail to stop, and the chapter treats the second failure as the dangerous one.
Life Lesson: Decide where you will stop before you begin: a number of hours, a number of revisions, a number of trips to the shop. Tell one person the number.
4. Leave the Vessel a Little Empty
Source: Tao Te Ching 9 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 持而盈之，不如其已。
“It is better to leave a vessel unfilled, than to attempt to carry it when it is full.”
Meaning: The image is a container carried in both hands: fill it to the brim and the walk spills it. 持而盈之, holding while filling, is the posture of anyone who can’t stop at nine-tenths. The chapter then doubles down: gold and jade in a hall can’t be guarded, and rank that makes a man proud files its own complaint. Only then does it reach the exit line about withdrawing once the work is done. All three are the same warning at different sizes.
Life Lesson: Leave one hour of the working day unbooked and defend it like a meeting. The next thing that runs late will need that hour.
5. Work for the Belly, Not the Eye
Source: Tao Te Ching 12 · translated from the Chinese
Original Chinese: 五色令人目盲；五音令人耳聋；五味令人口爽；驰骋畋猎，令人心发狂；难得之货，令人行妨。是以圣人为腹不为目，故去彼取此。
“Five colours blind the eye; five tones deafen the ear; five flavours dull the mouth. Galloping and hunting madden the heart; rare goods get in the way of what a person does. The sage works for the belly, not for the eye, and so leaves that and takes this.”
Meaning: Each of the five overloads is an appetite that can’t report its own limit, and the last one, 难得之货, is set by other people rather than by the body. Only after all five does the chapter give its rule. 为腹不为目 sets a ceiling against something with no ceiling, since the belly says when it’s full and the eye never does. Legge versified this chapter (“Colour’s five hues from th’ eyes their sight will take”), which is why the lines in circulation come from twentieth-century translators instead.
Life Lesson: Write the shopping list before leaving the house, and buy from the list. The eye will add two things the belly did not ask for.
6. Fewer Wants Beat a Stronger Will
Source: Tao Te Ching 19 · translated from the Chinese
Original Chinese: 见素抱朴，少私寡欲。
“Show the plain and hold the uncarved block; make the private self small and desire few.”
Meaning: The chapter’s first half is political and harsh, renouncing sageliness and benevolence, and it’s been argued over for 2,000 years. The last four characters survive the argument: 少私寡欲. Note the verb. It is 少, to make few, not 无, to have none. The book doesn’t ask for the elimination of desire, which nobody manages, but for a shorter list of them, which is a different instruction and a possible one.
Life Lesson: Cut one subscription, one group chat or one standing invitation this week. The aim is a shorter list, not a stronger grip.
7. Stop Paying Extra for Rare Things
Source: Tao Te Ching 64 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 是以圣人欲不欲，不贵难得之货。
“Therefore the sage desires what (other men) do not desire, and does not prize things difficult to get.”
Meaning: The chapter spends its first half on small beginnings, from the tree that fills the arms to the thousand-li walk. Then it turns to appetite. 难得之货, goods hard to get, is a phrase the book uses 3 times, and each time as a diagnosis: chapter 3 says prizing them makes thieves, chapter 12 says they lead conduct astray, and here the sage simply declines to price them. The value is assigned before it’s paid.
Life Lesson: Before buying the hard-to-get thing, wait a week and see whether the wanting survives. Most of it does not.
8. Four Things Already in the Room
Source: Tao Te Ching 80 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 甘其食，美其服，安其居，乐其俗。
“They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.”
Meaning: Four clauses, four nouns, no acquisition anywhere: food, clothes, dwelling, custom. The Chinese adds no adjective to any of them, and the four parenthetical words are Legge’s, not the text’s. He inserted poverty into a passage about satisfaction. Take them out and what remains is a description of people who’ve stopped comparing their dinner to someone else’s. The chapter’s politics are a separate argument, and these four clauses stand alone.
Life Lesson: Name three things you already own that you once badly wanted. Keep the list where you will see it on a bad day.
9. Let the Mud Settle Before You Answer
Source: Tao Te Ching 15 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 孰能浊以静之徐清？
“Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.”
Meaning: Three questions about change run together here, and all three depend on 徐, slowly, which the English quietly drops. Nothing in the line says the water clears because someone decided it should. It clears because it stops being stirred, and the stirring is the only variable under anyone’s control. The chapter ends on the same ceiling as chapter 9, 不欲盈 or not wanting to be full, and reaches it from the opposite direction.
Life Lesson: Draft the angry reply and leave it unsent until the next morning. Most of what needed saying will still be needed; the rest was mud.
10. Praise Disturbs You as Much as Blame
Source: Tao Te Ching 13 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 宠辱若惊，贵大患若身。
“Favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared; honour and great calamity, to be regarded as personal conditions (of the same kind).”
Meaning: The claim is narrower than stoicism. 宠 and 辱 are the same event because both put your standing in someone else’s hands, and the word for the effect is 惊, to be startled: getting the favour startles you, losing it startles you again. The second half asks why any of this has a grip and answers with the body: 为吾有身, because there’s a self to defend. That is an observation about stakes, not a doctrine of self-erasure.
Life Lesson: Notice which piece of feedback you reread twice. That is the one you have handed over, and it is worth naming before the next round.
11. Happiness Leans on Misery
Source: Tao Te Ching 58 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 祸兮，福之所倚，福兮，祸之所伏。
“Misery!—happiness is to be found by its side! Happiness!—misery lurks beneath it! Who knows what either will come to in the end?”
Meaning: Two exclamations and a question, and the question carries the weight: 孰知其极, who knows where either ends. Legge’s “happiness” translates 福, which is closer to blessing or good fortune than to a feeling, and this is the only place in his version where the English word is bolted to misery. The chapter is about government: lenient rule makes simple people, meddling rule makes cunning ones. The pair is therefore an argument against over-correcting. The Chinese can be checked chapter by chapter at the Daodejing in Chinese.
Life Lesson: When a good week arrives, write down what it is resting on. Something usually is, and the note makes the next bad week less of a shock.
12. Finish the Work and Don’t Sit in It
Source: Tao Te Ching 2 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 功成而弗居。夫唯弗居，是以不去。
“The work is accomplished, and there is no resting in it (as an achievement).”
Meaning: The chapter’s opening move is that pairs generate each other: beautiful and ugly, long and short, before and after. Whoever needs the credit has handed it to somebody else’s judgement. 弗居, not dwelling in it, is followed immediately by 是以不去, and so it doesn’t leave. The reward for not sitting in the achievement is that the achievement stays. It’s a strange bargain, and the chapter means it literally.
Life Lesson: Send the finished thing without the paragraph explaining how hard it was. Then notice whether anyone asks.
13. The Empty Part Is the Part That Works
Source: Tao Te Ching 11 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 三十辐共一毂，当其无，有车之用。
“The thirty spokes unite in the one nave; but it is on the empty space (for the axle), that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness, that their use depends.”
Meaning: Three objects, one argument: a wheel, a pot, a room. The material is what you can see and the use is what you can’t, and 当其无, where it is not, recurs 3 times in four sentences because English has no comfortable way to say it. Read as a claim about a life, this isn’t a recommendation to own less. It’s a reminder that capacity is the gap, and that a full calendar holds nothing, exactly like a full pot.
Life Lesson: Take one thing out of next week’s schedule and leave the space empty. Do not fill it when somebody asks.
14. The Crowd Looks Happy; the Writer Doesn’t
Source: Tao Te Ching 20 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 众人熙熙，如享太牢，如登春台。我独泊兮其未兆。
“The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased; as if enjoying a full banquet, as if mounted on a tower in spring. I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence.”
Meaning: This is the only place in eighty-one chapters where the book uses 忧, worry, and the line it sits in is 绝学无忧: cut off the learning and there’s no worry. What follows isn’t serene. It’s a portrait of someone at a party they can’t enjoy: everyone else at the feast, the writer like an infant that hasn’t smiled yet. Then comes the one boast available, 我独异于人, I alone am different, and I value what feeds me.
Life Lesson: At the next gathering, leave when you have had enough rather than when the room empties. Say goodbye properly on the way out.
15. Music and Cakes Stop the Traveller
Source: Tao Te Ching 35 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 乐与饵，过客止。
“Music and dainties will make the passing guest stop (for a time).”
Meaning: Two offers sit side by side in this chapter. 乐与饵, music and bait or music and cakes, halts the passer-by, and the halt is temporary. The Tao by contrast “seems insipid and has no flavour” and its use is inexhaustible. The test being proposed is duration, not intensity, which is an uncomfortable test for anything built to be enjoyed in the moment. Most of what’s designed to stop you does its work in the first ten seconds.
Life Lesson: List the three things that reliably hold your attention for an hour, and ask what each leaves behind. Keep the one that leaves something.
16. The Work Gets Done When Nobody Pushes
Source: Tao Te Ching 37 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 道常无为而无不为。
“The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”
Meaning: The paradox is six characters long: 无为而无不为. Legge’s parenthesis, “for the sake of doing it”, is the part most modern versions drop and the part that makes the line usable, because 无为 isn’t the absence of action but the absence of action performed to be seen performing. The rest of the chapter applies that restraint to other people, 万物将自化 or things transform themselves, and warns that the transformation produces a fresh appetite needing the same treatment. The mechanism is set out at length under wu wei.
Life Lesson: Cancel one recurring meeting for a month and watch whether the work it supervised still happens. If it does, the meeting was the interference.
17. Subtract the Doing, Not the Knowledge
Source: Tao Te Ching 48 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 为学日益，为道日损。
“He who devotes himself to learning (seeks) from day to day to increase (his knowledge); he who devotes himself to the Tao (seeks) from day to day to diminish (his doing).”
Meaning: Two directions of travel, 益 and 损, and the chapter is careful about what is being reduced: not knowledge, but doing. 为道日损 leads to 无为, and 无为 in the next breath leads to 无不为, so the reduction has a destination and is not an aesthetic. Set beside chapter 20’s 绝学无忧, the book is not against learning. It is against the accumulating habit that treats every addition as an upgrade.
Life Lesson: Take one report, dashboard or subscription you have not opened in a month and delete it. Notice how little the month changes.
18. Anything Forced Grows Old Early
Source: Tao Te Ching 55 · translated from the Chinese
Original Chinese: 物壮则老，谓之不道，不道早已。
“When things have grown strong they begin to grow old. This is called not being of the Way, and what is not of the Way comes to an early end.”
Meaning: The line closes a chapter about an infant: soft bones, a firm grip, a voice that doesn’t go hoarse from a day of crying. It is a warning about the opposite of infancy. 物壮则老 arrives because 和, harmony, has been replaced by 心使气, the mind driving the breath. The same four characters appear in chapter 30, attached to armies that won too decisively, so the book says it twice and means it twice.
Life Lesson: Pick the area where you are pushing hardest and take a full day off it this week. Watch whether it stalls or recovers.
19. Three Things Worth Keeping
Source: Tao Te Ching 67 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 我有三宝，持而保之。一曰慈，二曰俭，三曰不敢为天下先。
“But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others.”
Meaning: 慈, 俭, 不敢为天下先: gentleness, economy and not putting yourself first. The chapter gives each one a payoff: gentleness makes you bold, economy makes you generous, not leading lets you become the vessel. Each virtue funds the next, which isn’t how virtue is usually sold. It also names the failure plainly: keep the boldness and drop the gentleness, keep the spending and drop the economy, and the end is death.
Life Lesson: Buy nothing you don’t need for seven days and note what the week felt like. Economy is the easiest of the three to test.
20. Give It Away and You Have More
Source: Tao Te Ching 81 · trans. Legge, 1891
Original Chinese: 圣人不积，既以为人己愈有，既以与人己愈多。
“The sage does not accumulate (for himself). The more that he expends for others, the more does he possess of his own; the more that he gives to others, the more does he have himself.”
Meaning: The last chapter opens by distrusting fine words, 信言不美，美言不信, and closes with a claim that sounds like accounting. 不积, does not stockpile, and the reason given isn’t virtue but arithmetic: what is given away increases. Whether that’s metaphysics or a description of reputation is left open, and the ambiguity is probably deliberate. It’s an odd last line for a book that has spent eighty chapters recommending subtraction.
Life Lesson: Give away one thing you were saving for later: a book, an introduction, an afternoon. Do it before the week ends.
What Did Lao Tzu Believe About Happiness?
Lao Tzu treats happiness as a consequence of sufficiency rather than a goal. The book has no word for gladness, no programme for feeling good and no promise that a well-ordered life feels pleasant. What it has is a limit, 知足, and a warning about what happens when the limit is missing.
The vocabulary is worth noticing before the quotations. 喜, the ordinary word for being glad, never turns up in the eighty-one chapters. The positive words the book does use are structural: 足, enough; 安, settled; 静, still; 朴, uncarved. Each names a condition rather than a feeling, which is why these passages read like instructions to a householder and not like advice about mood.
Happiness Comes From Knowing When You Have Enough
Chapter 33 is built as four paired clauses: knowing others against knowing yourself, overcoming others against overcoming yourself, being satisfied against persevering, holding your place against lasting past death. The third pair does the work. 知足者富 sits beside 强行者有志, contentment next to persistence, so the person being described is not someone who has stopped. It is someone whose appetite has a floor under it, and whose effort doesn’t depend on the floor moving.
Then there is 富 itself. The chapter treats it as a consequence rather than a quantity: name what enough is and the balance stops being the measure of anything, leave it unnamed and every figure lands short.
| Chapter | The line | What it adds |
| 33 | 知足者富 | makes contentment the definition of wealth |
| 44 | 知足不辱，知止不殆 | splits feeling enough from stopping |
| 46 | 知足之足，常足矣 | says only this sufficiency lasts |
知足 — knowing sufficiency: the judgement that a given amount is enough, reached before the next amount arrives. It is a decision about a number, not a mood, and the book treats it as the hinge of a good life.
不知足 — not knowing sufficiency: the fault chapter 46 ranks above every other calamity, because no delivery can settle it. English calls the same thing ambition when it is going well.
Simplicity Means Fewer Wants, Not Fewer Things
The slogan is eight characters, 见素抱朴，少私寡欲, and the first four are the ones usually skipped. 素 is undyed silk, 朴 is wood before the carver touches it. Both are materials in an unfinished state. Read that way, the instruction isn’t to own less but to stay unfinished, keeping a surface that hasn’t been lacquered over.
The second half is narrower than its reputation. 少私 targets the private self, the part that measures everything against its own advantage, and asks for it to be smaller rather than gone. 寡欲 caps the number of wants rather than their strength, which is why the line survives being read by someone with a job and a mortgage: a shorter list is compatible with both.
朴 isn’t a one-off image either. The word turns up in 6 chapters, and chapter 37 uses it twice for the thing that settles an appetite once it starts up again: 镇之以无名之朴, settle them with the nameless uncarved block.
Happiness Requires Accepting That Fortune Moves
Chapter 58 holds the line most often printed as Lao Tzu’s view of luck: 祸兮福之所倚，福兮祸之所伏, misery is what good fortune leans on and good fortune is what misery hides inside. Legge renders the pair as a warning that happiness sits beside misery and misery lurks beneath it, then asks the question the chapter turns on: “Who knows what either will come to in the end?”
What follows is stranger than the quotation suggests. 正复为奇，善复为妖: the straight turns crooked, the good turns ominous. This isn’t a reassurance that things even out. It is a warning that the standard you’re using to judge may itself flip. The chapter draws the political conclusion before any personal one, and ends on a sage who is “bright, but does not dazzle.”
Read together, the four chapters are political before they are personal. Chapter 46 puts its contentment line in the second half of a passage that opens with warhorses, and chapter 80 puts four satisfactions inside a description of a state small enough to hear its neighbour’s dogs. The book’s grief is placed the same way: 悲 appears once, in chapter 31, and 哀 twice, in 31 and 69: 3 occurrences, all of them inside the 2 chapters about war. Grief has a location, and it isn’t the middle of an ordinary life.
I can’t find a line in the eighty-one chapters that promises a cheerful life to a person who lives this way. Chapter 20 is the counter-evidence: the writer stands at the feast and can’t join it. The distinction matters when the passages are gathered by theme, because a page of Lao Tzu quotes on life ends up with a different set of chapters than this one, since 生 and 足 pull in different directions and only a handful of chapters hold both.
Are These Really Lao Tzu Quotes? Understanding Authenticity and Translation
Most Lao Tzu quotes on happiness circulating in English are not his. Two of the three most-shared lines have no chapter behind them at all, and the third is a fair paraphrase wearing a quotation’s clothes. The test isn’t suspicion. It is a chapter number, and every line above has one.
Did Lao Tzu say “If you are depressed, you are living in the past”?
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
— Not Laozi.
The line is the most-shared Lao Tzu quotation on the internet and it is not in the book. The earliest print trace I can find is a Hazelden daily meditation, Days of Healing, Days of Joy (1987), where a speaker identified only as “Jimmy R.” says that anxiety is living in the future and depression in the past; the third sentence about peace is added later. Stefan Stenudd, who has traced a book’s worth of these lines, dates the first Facebook post crediting Laozi to 19 December 2009. Depression and anxiety as described here are modern clinical categories, and nothing in Warring States Chinese maps onto them cleanly.
One thing I could not settle: whether the 1987 Hazelden citation is the first printing of the line or a reprint of something earlier. It is the earliest I can verify, and the question stays unresolved rather than rounded down to a date I like.
Did he say “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished”?
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
— Not Laozi.
No chapter contains it and the sentence’s rhythm is twentieth-century. The nearest thing in the text is chapter 37, 道常无为而无不为, the Tao that does nothing and leaves nothing undone, which makes a claim about non-interference rather than about patience. The paraphrase keeps the comfort and drops the mechanism, which is how a line becomes shareable and stops being an argument. The vocabulary of hurry isn’t there to translate, either: 急 does not occur anywhere in the eighty-one chapters, and neither does 从容.
Is “Mastering others is strength” a real Lao Tzu quote?
“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”
— Not Laozi, quite.
Half of it is. Chapter 33 has 胜人者有力，自胜者强, overcoming others is force and overcoming yourself is strength, and Legge renders the pair as “He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty.” The circulating version adds “true” to power, which the Chinese does not carry, and flattens 有力 against 强, the distinction the chapter is built on. Calling it fake overstates the case. It’s a paraphrase with a quotation’s confidence, which is the harder problem to spot.
How to check one in a minute
Take any English line and find a distinctive word in it, then search the Chinese for the character that would have to be there. If nothing matches, the line isn’t in the book, whatever the graphic says. If something matches, read the chapter around it, because most misquotations are real passages with the second half removed and the second half is usually where the condition lives.
I checked all 20 chapters above against the Chinese and against Legge’s 1891 edition, which sits on Project Gutenberg as #216, and I found no case where the English improved on the original. When I can’t place a line, it doesn’t go on the page. The rest of the cluster is indexed under fake Lao Tzu quotes.
Questions People Ask About Lao Tzu Quotes on Happiness
What Did Lao Tzu Say About Happiness?
Lao Tzu says less about happiness than the quotation collections suggest. The Daodejing never uses a word for gladness. Its three direct statements about a good life are that sufficiency is wealth (chapter 33), that not knowing sufficiency is the worst calamity (46), and that fortune and ruin sit inside each other (58). Everything else in the book is about keeping those three in view.
What Is the Most Famous Lao Tzu Quote About Happiness?
The chapter 33 line, usually in a modern wording: “He who is contented is rich.” Legge’s 1891 rendering is “He who is satisfied with his lot is rich”, and the difference is not small, because “contented” names a feeling while “satisfied with his lot” names a judgement about a share. Both translate 知足者富, four characters, and the gap between the two English versions is the gap between a mood and a verdict.
How Does Taoism Define Happiness?
Taoism is a wider thing than one book, and the Daodejing never defines happiness. Religious Taoism, which organises from the second century CE, brings a pantheon, longevity practice and ritual that this text knows nothing about, so a definition taken from the book is narrower than the tradition it starts. What the book supplies is a measure rather than a mood: 知足, the point at which a quantity is enough. Daoism holds the wider picture.
What Is the Difference Between Happiness and Contentment?
Happiness names a feeling that arrives and leaves. Contentment names a judgement about a sum, and a judgement can be held in bad circumstances, which a feeling cannot. The book only has vocabulary for the second. 乐, its nearest word for delight, is a verb in every chapter but 35, where it means music; 足, enough, is a measure a person can apply on any day.
Which Chapter of the Tao Te Ching Talks About Being Content?
Chapter 33 carries the famous line, 知足者富. Chapter 44 has the pair 知足不辱，知止不殆 and the three comparisons that lead into it. Chapter 46 has the strongest form, 知足之足，常足矣, inside a passage that opens with warhorses. Chapter 32 also uses 知止, in a passage about names and where they stop. No other chapter uses either phrase.
How Can I Find Inner Peace According to Lao Tzu?
“Inner peace” is not a phrase the book has, and its word for quiet is a verb as often as a condition. 静 runs through chapter 15, where muddy water clears by being still, and chapter 37, where it is what remains once desire has settled; chapter 26 calls stillness the ruler of agitation. The nearest instruction is 不欲盈, not wanting to be full, which chapter 15 places at its close.
