Quotes About Misery

True celebration should come from your life, in your life. And true celebration cannot be according to the calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange, the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either, the misery is false, or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And once the first of November has gone, you are back in your dark hole, everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety.

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.

If you have desires, try to look - are those desires the cause of your misery? Nobody wants misery, but nobody is willing to drop the desires - and they are together, they cannot be separated. This is one of the greatest insights that has come from all the enlightened people in the world - that desire is the root of all misery, and desirelessness is the cause of all that is beautiful and blissful.

Change only one thing, change from misery to bliss. from sadness to celebration. And it can be done very easily because misery is an unnatural thing.

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to 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.

A man of fashion does not like to be reckoned poor, no more than he likes to be reckoned unhappy. We none of us endeavor to be happy, Sir, but merely to be thought so; and for my part, I had rather be in a state of misery, and envied for my supposed happiness, than in a state of happiness, and pitied for my supposed misery.

I 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.

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

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.

At least we should learn to understand our fellow beings, for we are powerless to stop their misery, their ignominy, their suffering, their weakness, and their death.

I'm not a big proponent of happiness. I think it's highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There's so much value in that. You can't have one without the other.

He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.

The majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.

But say That death be not one stroke, as I supposed, Bereaving sense, but endless misery From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuity; ay me, that fear Comes thund'ring back with dreadful revolution On my defenceless head; both Death and I Am found eternal, and incorporate both, Nor I on my part single, in me all Paradise Lost Posterity stands cursed: fair patrimony That I must leave ye, sons; O were I able To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!

I'd been so set on an escape that was now impossible, and the only form of freedom left to me was death. It was a terrible kind of freedom—one from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.

Look beyond the individual to the cause of his misery.

Many animal rescue organizations hit with a hard-core, heartbreaking message. Their videos and stories can become difficult for average people to watch. By taking a more positive, heartwarming approach to animal rescue, I've been able to engage people and keep them engaged for years. Instead of selling the agony and misery - and sadly, there is no shortage of that - I start with the happy endings. I work backwards so the first message they get is joy and success due to their involvement. Opening the mind with humor and joy gets the rescue message in that much deeper.

A pirate spreading misery and ruin over the face of the ocean

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

If 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.

If you're trying to be something you're not, whether it's an age or a certain type of personality, you're just going to be in misery. You have to own who you are, and part of who you are is your age.

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

The cup of Ireland's misery has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet half full.

What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.

People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.

The labor movement was the principal force that transforme­d misery and despair into hope and progress.

I cannot live on an island of prosperity when I'm surrounded by a sea of misery.

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.

I strongly believe that we can create a poverty-free world, if we want to.... In that kind of world, [the] only place you can see poverty is in the museum. When school children will be on a tour of the poverty museum, they will be horrified to see the misery and indignity of human beings. They will blame their forefathers for tolerating this inhuman condition to continue in a massive way.

One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

Seems it's my destiny for love to cause me misery.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.

You pile of stones, you waste, you desolation, I'll stuff you with misery till it comes out of your eyes. I'll change your heart into green grass, and all you love into a sheep. I'll turn you into a bad poet with dreams.

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

We come together only to go apart again. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle & misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. The law of life. No sense in battling against it.

It is only in misery that we recognize the hand of God leading good men to good.

Marriages that made out of love (so-called "love-matches") have error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother.

My reign is not yet over... you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives; but many hard and miserable hours must you endure until that period shall arrive.

It is when we are in misery that we revere the gods; the prosperous seldom approach the altar.

The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers.

I refuse to "look up." Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man's fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.

When happiness gets into your system, it is bound to break out on your face. While money can't buy happiness it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery. You always know, at this very moment, exactly what it would be to look, and feel, and be, and act completely Happy.

The wild stuff is all so overrated. Drinking, you don't feel good all the time. There's a lot of down, a lot of misery.