Discontent,” Father Maturin said, enunciating the word with a strange vigor and looking straight at Elizabeth, “may be God’s catapult, His way of saying: ‘Go and try yourself now.

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure

If we make one criterion for defining the artist the impulse to make something new, or to do something in a new way – a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good – then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.

Contentment makes poor men rich. Discontent makes rich men poor.

He felt he was himself and did not want to be otherwise. He only wanted to be better than he had been before.