quotations about misery
Here is a thing which the more you fear and avoid it the nearer you approach to it, and this is misery; the more you flee from it the more miserable and restless you will become.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
We are apt to measure the happiness or misery of the world by that portion of either which has fallen to our lot.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
A little misery sweetens existence. It is the salt that makes it palatable and wholesome.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
It is a consolation of human life that the sick forget what it is like to feel well, or the miserable to be happy.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Condemned Playground
Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery.
C. S. LEWIS
The Magician's Nephew
Misery appears to improve the intellect, but this is only because it dismisses fear.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Misery is a veil through which the world can see our errors, but seldom discover our virtues.
WILLIAM OCCAM
attributed, Day's Collacon
To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Of Human Bondage
Thou art not born to misery; the Almighty never called any of His creatures into existence to render them unhappy; yet man may be wretched from his own follies and vices; his reason may yield to the wild impulses of tumultuous passion; then man is wretched, and every seeming good is perverted into misery.
CONRAD GESSNER
attributed, Day's Collacon
There is no people so miserable, but that at some time or other, in some respect or other, they have reason to account themselves happy. And if they would but duly consider how it is with many of their neighbours, they would find it their duty to be thankful, that it is no worse with themselves; for it is some relief to the unfortunate to show them that there are others yet more miserable.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's happy. It's only that.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Possessed
Misery travels free through the whole world!
FRIEDRICH SCHILLER
Wallenstein's Tod
From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then -- we went on dancing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
You begin to see that you yourself, innocent, upright you, have contributed and do contribute to the misery of the world. Which will never end because we're what we are.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
There is a lightness, a lightening, that comes along with misery: vast portions of your life are shorn off, suddenly ignorable.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest
Perhaps it may be found more easy to forget those tempers we learnt in misery.
EDMUND LAW
attributed, Day's Collacon
But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Prince
Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Letters to a Young Poet
All that was really there was still more misery -- oh yes! as much of that as you like.
EMILE ZOLA
Germinal