Quotes About Misery

You listen to the mind, you become miserable - otherwise, this today is paradise! And there is no other paradise, this today is nirvana. If you had not listened to the mind... just don't listen to the mind, then you are not in misery; because misery cannot exist without expectations and without hopes. And when misery exists you need more hopes for it, to hide it, to live somehow. Live hopelessly - then you are a righteous man, then you are retired.

Happiness is threatening and misery is safe - safe for the ego. Ego can exist only in misery and through misery. Ego is an island surrounded by hell; happiness is threatening to the ego, to the very existence of the ego. Happiness rises like a sun and the ego disappears, evaporates like a dewdrop on the grass leaf.

If you get attached, then it becomes an obsession. If the person is not there, you are unhappy. If you miss the person, you are in misery. And attachment is such a disease that if the person is not there you are in misery, and if the person is there you are indifferent. Then it is okay; it is taken for granted. If the person is there it is okay - no more than that. If the person is not there, then you are in misery. This is attachment.

Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!

The most miserable man in the world of those meant for Paradise will be dipped once in Paradise. Then he will be asked, "Son of Adam, did you ever face any misery? Did you ever experience any hardship?" So he will say, "No, by God, O Lord! I never faced any misery, and I never experienced any hardship."

She had been so consumed with escaping her own misery, she hadn't considered the misery she might inflict.

The more desires you have, the more misery you will create for yourself. Misery is a consequence of desiring - and you go on desiring. In fact, you think that if your desires are fulfilled your miseries will disappear. In the first place they are never fulfilled; in the second place, if they are fulfilled, nothing is fulfilled by their fulfillment. You remain as empty as you have always been - or even more, because up to now you were occupied with a certain desire; now even that is fulfilled. A deep deep emptiness comes to you.

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.

Today's misery is real unemployment, home foreclosures and bankruptcies. This is the Obama Misery Index - and it's at a record high. It's going to take more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work - it's going to take a new president.

Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.

In 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.

To remain attached to the temporal, to the changing is to remain within the world of misery because the temporal will be taken away. You have invested so much in it but one day everything is taken away. Then it is natural to feel miserable. Misery is rooted in attachment to the body and bliss is rooted in non-attachment to the body; hence all the great masters have been teaching methods and means of non-attachment, of getting disidentified with the body, with the mind, with everything surrounds you, and of just remaining a pure witness. That's what we are: pure witnessing, pure awareness.

Malthus argued a century and a half ago that man, by using up all his available resources, would forever press on the limits of subsistence, thus condemning humanity to an indefinite future of misery and poverty. We can now begin to hope and, I believe, know that Malthus was expressing not a law of nature, but merely the limitation then of scientific and social wisdom. The truth or falsity of his prediction will depend now, with the tools we have, on our own actions, now and in the years to come.

Life isn't supposed to be an all or nothing battle between misery and bliss. Life isn't supposed to be a battle at all. And when it comes to happiness, well, sometimes life is just okay, sometimes it's comfortable, sometimes wonderful, sometimes boring, sometimes unpleasant. When your day's not perfect, it's not a failure or a terrible loss. It's just another day.

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed...In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

HAPPY EVER AFTER is a concept I'll never believe in. I would be content to sample some little taste of happiness today, tonight, right now. Though I know without a doubt that tomorrow will come saturated with pain. Life is like that. At least my life. And honestly, I cant think of anyone whose life is any different. The price tag for joy is misery. [...]

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove.

I think I would co-direct because I love actors and I've got a very good eye. I'm not a second-guesser. I don't think that I would be very happy, getting inundated by financial issues. I would love to co-direct with somebody because that would be a real freedom and an adventure, and then I could leave all the pain and misery to them. I'm not glib about it. I would take the responsibility to make a really good movie.

A church that is deeply aware of it's misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient

Them white people made hate. They made hate just like they had a formula for it and followed that formula down to the last exact gallon of misery put in. Well ... that's what they made and that's what they got.

Don't settle for comfortable misery, a sad state where you're hanging on to what is most predictable and familiar at the risk of letting exciting opportunities pass you by.

Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

Life: 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.

Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.

Misery is complexity. Happiness is simplicity.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

That's why I've come to you, to seek release from a curse of misery and horror against which I'm powerless to fight alone.

I'm holding a teardrop for a friend Until his heartache and misery end.

There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance – 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 – ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.

The only conversion involved in Vipassana is from misery to happiness, from bondage to liberation.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

Both salvation and punishment for man lie in the fact that if he lives wrongly he can befog himself so as not to see the misery of his position.

I 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.

If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.

In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.

Companions, in misery and worse, that is what we all are, and to try to change this substantially avails us nothing.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.

It 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.

We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery - crocus on a garbage heap.

Life is a joyous thing essentially, but when you bind life by all these rigid moralities and traditions, and dogmas and creeds, then there is misery.

All 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.

The guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us - that is all He asks.

One of the prevailing sources of misery and crime is in the generally accepted assumption, that because things have been wrong a long time, it is impossible they will ever be right.

I think crime is a huge issue for people. If you were living in the poorest state, and you've got drug dealers at the end of the street, and your life's in misery, and you're afraid of your kids going out the door. I mean, the job of progressive politicians is to do something about that.

Thinking aloud is a habit which is responsible for most of mankind's misery.