misery quotes

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand.

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

There is nothing more miserable in the world than to arrive in paradise and look like your passport photo.

Many people feel so pressured by the expectations of others that it causes them to be frustrated, miserable and confused about what they should do. But there is a way to live a simple, joy-filled, peaceful life, and the key is learning how to be led by the Holy Spirit, not the traditions or expectations of man.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death… I think… peace and tranquillity will return again.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.

Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action, which produces further confusion, further misery.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Oh! Most miserable wretch that I am! Why have I not learnt how to swim?