Quotes About Misfortune

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, can be prolonged to the point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation.

I change my direction, I can't even help it. It's sort of like the fortune and misfortune of being a rapper.

Good luck in most cases comes through the misfortune of others.

Do not go looking for problems to feed your soul. Just let life be your teacher. It will nourish you with its inevitable difficulties. How will you know whether you are letting life teach you and nourish you? If your physical senses become more sensitive to the beauty you see, the words of love you hear, and the life you feel touching your body and soul, then you know you have discovered the great value of misfortune.

No one step back, that is the idea.... Fight it out, whatever comes. Let the stars move from the sphere! Let the whole world stand against us!.... What of it? Thus fight! You gain nothing by becoming cowards.... Taking a step backward, you do not avoid any misfortune.

The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage.

No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse. (Apr 2007 Gen Conf)

The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.

The devil is not only a liar, but also a murderer, he constantly seeks our life, and wreaks his anger whenever he can afflict our bodies with misfortune and harm. Hence it comes that he often breaks men's necks or drives them to insanity, drowns some, and incites many to commit suicide, and to many other terrible calamities. Therefore there is nothing for us to do upon earth but to pray against this arch enemy without ceasing. For unless God preserved us, we would not be safe from him even for an hour.

The fabric of a mighty state, which has been reared by the labours of successive ages, could not be overturned by the misfortune of a single day, if the fatal power of the imagination did not exaggerate the real measure of the calamity.

We fell silent and all joking ceased. We gazed mutely into each other's eyes and an intense longing for the fullest avowal of the truth forced us to a confession, requiring no words whatever, or the incommensurable misfortune that weighed upon us. With tears and sobs we sealed a vow to belong to each other alone.

No excuses and no sob stories. Life is full of excuses if you're looking. I have no time to gripe over misfortune. I don't waste time looking back.

What a misfortune it would be, religiously speaking and educationally speaking, if we could only work happily with those who saw things as we do.

Ah, lives of men! When prosperous they glitter - Like a fair picture; when misfortune comes - A wet sponge at one blow has blurred the painting.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

When I was happy I thought I knew men, but it was fated that I should know them in misfortune only.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

The swift wind of compromise is a lot more devastating than the sudden jolt of misfortune.

It's one thing to be a high achiever; it's quite another to privately sneer at your girlfriend's friends after feigning friendliness because they have the "misfortune" to drive a bus for a living.

Most bad luck is the misfortune of not being an exception.

Worry is when you choose from millions of possible thoughts, only the few which deal with a potential misfortune or problem. Once you accept your worrying as the act of choosing specific thoughts, you can consciously make an effort to avoid those thoughts that cause you needless pain and choose more constructive, positive thoughts.

Tis misfortune that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude, or endurance, in hearts where these qualities had never come to life but for the circumstance which gave them a being.

It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson.

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.

No degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

I don't regard Jews as a class. I regard them as a privileged misfortune.

Man's greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes.

...Hope endures and overcomes misfortune and evil.

Men are themselves the source of their own fortune and misfortune.

The constant man loses not his virtue in misfortune. A torch may point towards the ground, but its flame will still point upwards.

Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own?...You carry your fortune in your own hand.

The vain man makes a merit of misfortune, and triumphs in his disgrace.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

Misfortune and Fortune are eerily similar, but Fortune is a better dresser and more fun at parties.

Covetousness is the greatest misfortune. One who does not know what is enough will never have enough.

Misfortune can force you into doing things you should be doing anyway. Lessons come from adversity. Anything can happen to anyone... You can find a new lease on life - more meaning than you thought possible in simple things... Let go. Live in the moment. Go forward.

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

The purpose of life is not to fight against evil and misfortune; it is to unveil magnificence.

I don't want names, but you have to have bumped into some pretty nasty artists with pretty big chips on their shoulders. I'd like an anecdote about the most obnoxious personality you had the misfortune of working with, albeit as anonymously as you feel comfortable divulging.

Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune.

When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans as anywhere else--at least, if you're black and poor, and have the misfortune of doing your drugs somewhere other than the dorms at Tulane University. But if you are lucky enough to be living at Tulane, which is a pretty white place, especially contrasted with the city where it's located, which is 65 percent black, then you are absolutely set.

Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?

The theory [before the twentieth century] ... was that all the jobs in the world belonged by right to men, and that only men were by nature entitled to wages. If a woman earned money, outside domestic service, it was because some misfortune had deprived her of masculine protection.

Fear Allah, for that is fortune; indifference to Allah is misfortune.