Popular quotes about Misery! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 56
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.
RajneeshWe want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanityโs rebellion from God.
R. C. SproulIf attachment is the conditioning factor, then non-attachment will become the unconditioning factor. If expectation leads you in misery, then non-expectation will lead you into non-misery. If anger creates a hell within you, then compassion will create a heaven. So whatsoever the process of misery, the reverse will be the process of happiness. Unconditioning means you have to understand the whole knotted phenomenon of human consciousness as it is.
RajneeshMisery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels.
Joseph AddisonParticipation is bliss because the whole universe is celebrating. Every moment it is celebrating. It is a great celebration, a constant celebration. Only we are not part of it. We have detached ourselves and are in misery. Man is in misery because of the mind. The flowers are participating in the celebration, the moon is participating, the stars are participating, the earth is participating, the oceans are participating, the air and the clouds - everything is participating in that continuous, eternal celebration.
RajneeshI 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 FergusonWith everything we do in life we identify ourselves. Here is a man who says harsh words to me. I feel anger coming on me. In a few seconds anger and I are one, and then comes misery. Attach yourselves to the Lord and to nothing else, because everything else is unreal. Attachment to the unreal will bring misery. There is only one Existence that is real, only one Life in which there is neither object nor [subject].
Swami VivekanandaIf men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery.
Albert EinsteinFor if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.
Annie ProulxThose who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
Albert CamusI'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 freedomโone from misery and pain, yes, but also one from lightness and laughter and life. It was an absence of everything.
Alexander Gordon SmithThe threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
Nigel CalderAs 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.
Blaise PascalLife, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
Sigmund FreudWithout 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 AustenThe shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous.
Jerome K. JeromeTo avoid pain we must know the conditions of health. For the accomplishment of this end we must rely upon investigation instead of faith, upon labor in place of prayer. Most misery is produced by ignorance. Passions sow the seeds of pain.
Robert Green IngersollCan princes born in palaces be sensible of the misery of those who dwell in cottages?
Stanisลaw I LeszczyลskiIntemperance is the epitome of every crime, the cause of every kind of misery.
Douglas William JerroldThere 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 ArendtIdleness, 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 HugoWhen the soul, through its own fault... becomes rooted in a pool of pitch-black, evil smelling water, it produces nothing but misery and filth.
Teresa of AvilaRage 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 ArendtMisery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.
Toni MorrisonThe labor movement was the principal force that transformeยญd misery and despair into hope and progress.
Martin Luther King, Jr.At the heart of our desires is eternal happiness without the slightest hint of misery. You could say that we are pleasure seekers; however, seeking pleasure from the objects of our five senses produces fleeting moments of pleasure whereas, pleasure of one's self, a soul, is eternal and ever-increasing pleasure.
Terry Cole-WhittakerOur lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.
Augusten BurroughsYou 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 SteinI drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they're heartbreaking.[...] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.
Osamu DazaiAll 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 SharpThe most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
George EliotWe (Muslims) have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realise that it was the negligence of the Muslims - and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam - that caused our present decay.
Muhammad AsadAmour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Aldous HuxleyIf people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery. If people are blissful you cannot lead them to war -- to Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense!
RajneeshAnything we do to fight misery and ignorance and poverty, no matter how imperfect it may be, is still better than doing nothing at all.
Peter PrangeWhy is it, I wonder, that people suffer, when there is so little need, when an effort of will and some hard work would bring them from their misery into peace and contentment.
Richard LlewellynNo 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 HaweisThis, 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 โ like it or not โ 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.
Thomas LigottiMarriages that made out of love (so-called "love-matches") have error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother.
Friedrich NietzscheThe gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.
Robert WyattPlainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.
Christopher Hitchens