Popular quotes about Misery! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 48
I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
Werner HerzogLook, 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 RothkoA special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space.
Fyodor DostoevskySecrecy is for the happy,--misery, hopeless misery, needs no veil; under a thousand suns it dares act openly.
Friedrich SchillerIs not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.
Henry David ThoreauI am the Saudi Arabia of unhappiness. I have so many reserves of misery that you wouldn't understand. I actually think that's part of why I connect with Canadians. I think they understand grinding misery underneath.
Craig FergusonIn the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.
Ahmed Ben BellaWhen he has lost all hope, all object in life, man becomes a monster in his misery.
Fyodor DostoevskyBold words and bolder deeds are what we want. Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep?
Swami VivekanandaFailure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
Montgomery CliftThere is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
Victor HugoCreate all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove.
Jeremy BenthamLife is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.
Phillips BrooksWhen you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand.
Piper KermanHis desperation and misery swept her up like a storm capturing the sea. She turned her mind to even these feelings, because they were his, like his terrified rage in the lift when they had first met, being wrapped in his arms in the cold well, being dazzled by his wonder at the woods and her home and her. Like being a child, awareness of him the morning chorus that woke her and the lullaby that sent her to sleep, his thoughts always her first and last song.I love you, Kami told him, and cut.
Sarah Rees BrennanSupreme happiness will be the greatest cause of misery, and the perfection of wisdom the occassion of folly.
Leonardo da VinciIt 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 WashingtonThe 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 MoyoHope is a terrible thing, she said. Is it? Yes, it keep you living in another place, a place which doesn't exist. For some people it's better than where they are. For many it's a relief. From life, she said. A relief from life? Is that living? Some people don't have a choice. No and that's awful for them. Hope is better than misery, he said. Or despair. Hope belongs in the same box as despair. Hope is not so bad, he said. At least despair has truth to it.
Susan MinotMisery is nothing but the shadow of attachment. And hence all stagnancy. The attached person becomes a stagnant pool - sooner or later he will stink. He flows no more.
RajneeshThere is no sin so profound, no despondency so low, no misery so abject, but the love of Christ is deeper.
F.B. MeyerWithout scheming to do wrong, or to make others unhappy, there may be error and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people's feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business.
Jane AustenGreed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.
Charlie ChaplinAll 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 MacDonaldLife: in all it's pain, misery, grandiosity and glory. I sing for myself, yet if others truly find inspiration through my words, then I have accidently done something brilliant in my life.
John O'CallaghanThe second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.
Thomas JeffersonLife is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.
Leon TrotskyBuddha says this is how one should be - no desire, because all desires are futile. They are about the future; life is in the present. All desires distract you from the present, all desires distract you from life, all desires are destructive of life, all desires are postponements of life. Life is now and the desire takes you away, farther and farther away from now. And when we see that our life is misery we go on throwing the responsibility on others, and nobody is responsible except us.
RajneeshO witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.
Arthur RimbaudThe supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.
John FowlesThere is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance โ poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death โ ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.
Hannah ArendtI think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.
John CusackRage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such; no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.
Hannah ArendtStrength, strength it is that we want so much in this life, for what we call sin and sorrow have all one cause, and that is our weakness. With weakness comes ignorance, and with ignorance comes misery.
Swami VivekanandaThe sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
Graham GreeneThe Southern newspapers, with their advertisements of negro sales and personal descriptions of fugitive slaves, supply details of misery that it would be difficult for imagination to exceed. Scorn, derision, insult, menace - the handcuff, the last - the tearing away of children from parents, of husbands from wives - the weary trudging in droves along the common highways, the labor of body, the despair of mind, the sickness of heart - these are the realities which belong to the system, and form the rule, rather that the exception, in the slave's experience.
Fanny KembleIt seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.
Walter IsaacsonYou know we have Democratic centrists here to blame for the economic conditions driving this rightwing extremism. So the solution here, you know, is not Hillary Clinton and more of the Clintonism centrist, the centrist Clinton philosophy that is greeding this economic misery.
Jill SteinMartin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.
VoltaireAll solitary enjoyments, quickly fall, or become painful, so that, perhaps, no more insufferable misery can be conceived than that which must follow incommunicable privileges. Only imagine a human being condemned to perpetual youth while all around him decay and die. O, how sincerely would he call upon death for deliverance!
James Sharp