Popular quotes about Misery! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 24
Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.
Mark RothkoThe misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
Joan RobinsonNothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
Sri Nisargadatta MaharajSecrecy is for the happy,--misery, hopeless misery, needs no veil; under a thousand suns it dares act openly.
Friedrich SchillerThere are hundreds of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them. There may be a million microbes of misery floating about us. Never mind! They dare not approach us, they have no power to get a hold on us, until the mind is weakened. This is the great fact: strength is life. Weakness is death. Strength is felicity, life eternal, immortal. Weakness is constant strain and misery: weakness is death
Swami VivekanandaThe way that the stories go in the Snicket books is just the way stories naturally go to me. They're full of misery, and yet the misery ends up being slightly hilarious. And in terms of the warnings on the back of the books, that really started as an honest assessment of their marketability.
Daniel HandlerChange is always subjective. To talk of evil and misery is nonsense, because they do not exist outside. If I am immune from all anger, I never feel angry. If am immune from all hatred, I never feel hatred.
Swami VivekanandaFailure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
Montgomery CliftAmerican mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.
Cornel WestBut who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.
Jerome K. JeromeIt should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.
George WashingtonLoving the ideal more than the reality is the cause of all the misery the human species creates for itself.
Dean KoontzThou hast seen many sorrows, travel-stained pilgrim of the world, But that which hath vexed thee most, hath been the looking for evil; And though calamities have crossed thee, and misery been heaped on thy head, Yet ills that never happened, have chiefly made thee wretched.
Martin Farquhar TupperThe notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.
Dambisa MoyoThere are topics which are common to men and women. I think that if a woman speaks of oppression, of misery, she will speak of it in exactly the same way as a man. But if she speaks of her own personal problems as a woman, she will obviously speak in another way.
Simone de BeauvoirAll those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.
George MacDonaldI have no ambition. I just have a very loving duty given to me in my spiritual heritage of the Himalayan Masters who have passed down this duty from generation to generation, perhaps for thousands of generations: The world has misery, the world has suffering. Do what you can to reduce the pain. Do what you can to soothe people's minds. Don't just counsel, Mr. Therapist ... console.
Swami Veda BharatiOne thing, however, is sure: unless Christians fulfill their prophetic role, unless they become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or another 'their blood cries to heaven,' and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony.
Jacques EllulI, like most of my friends, couldn't believe I bought a mountain called Misery Mountain, because it was so appropriate.
Caleb CarrThere is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.
Abraham Joshua HeschelKill me, Doug. Just kill me now. Put me out of my misery.โ โChrist, Kincaid, what did you say to him?โ murmured Doug. โWell,โ I told Doug, โI ripped on his fans and on how long it takes for his books to come out.โ Doug stared at me, his expectations exceeded. โThen I saidโnot knowing who he wasโthat Iโd be Seth Mortensenโs love slave in exchange for advanced copies of his books.
Richelle MeadHe wanted to make her laugh. He wanted to sit and listen to her talk about books until his ears fell off. 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 Clarethe wealthy white western minority of the world could not hope to prosper if most of the rest of mankind were foundering in hopeless poverty. Islands of plenty in a vast ocean of misery never have been a good recipe for commercial success.
Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of LodsworthIdleness, pleasure, what abysses! To do nothing is a dreary course to take, be sure of it. To live idle upon the substance of society! To be useless, that is to say, noxious! This leads straight to the lowest depth of misery.
Victor HugoIf anyone thinks he can help you, he will inevitably mislead you, and the less phony he is; the more powerful he is, the more enlightened he is, the more misery and mischief he will create for you.
U.G. KrishnamurtiHuman beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there's nothing there to grab hold of.
AdyashantiThe fact that we became a nation and immediately separated church and state - it has saved us from all the misery that has beset mankind with inquisitions, internecine and civil wars, and other assorted ills.
Dumas MaloneOur lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.
Augusten BurroughsAll human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only beloved who will never pass away.
C. S. LewisFrom the moment I told her about my dad, it was as if her whole body sighed in relief. As if someone elseโs misery comforted her, made her feel as if she wasnโt alone.
Simone ElkelesPolitics deals with externals: borders, wealth, crimes. Authentic forgiveness deals with the evil in a persons heart, something for which politics has no cure. Virulent evil (racism, ethnic hatred) spreads through society like an airborne disease, one cough infects a whole busload. When moments of grace do occur, the world must pause, fall silent, and acknowledge that indeed forgiveness offers a kind of cure. There will be no escape from wars, from hunger, from misery, from rancid discrimination, from denial of human rights, if our hearts aren't changed.
Philip YanceyThere is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions - including literal slavery - all over the world.
Ben H. WintersI want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable--indescribable--my misery amazing.
Charles DickensNo hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within.
Hugh Reginald HaweisIt is only in misery that we recognize the hand of God leading good men to good.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheHere ah am in the junky's limbo; too sick tae sleep, too tired tae stay awake. A twilight zone ay the senses where nothing's real except the crushing, omnipresent misery n pain in your mind n body.
Irvine WelshThere are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself... Why be in misery at the last?
Christina SteadNo more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.
Bob AvakianMisery is not given by anyone or anything in life. It is your own mind which makes you miserable or happy and uplifted.
Sri Sri Ravi ShankarCommerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyThose peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grind-stone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty.
Herman MelvilleWhen doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.
Steven Kotler