Quotes About Misfortune

What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.

The greatest misfortune of all is not to be able to bear misfortune.

Love can achieve unexpected majesty in the rocky soil of misfortune.

As long as you can savor the humorous aspect of misery and misfortune, you can overcome anything.

Not the least misfortune in a prominent falsehood is the fact that tradition is apt to repeat it for truth.

How true it is that, sooner or later, the' most rebellious must bow beneath the yoke of misfortune!

What molting time is to birds, so adversity or misfortune is ... for us humans.

Nothing is more difficult than the art of maneuver. What is difficult about maneuver is to make the devious route the most direct and to turn misfortune to advantage.

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys schooling interfere with their education!

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I should liked to be wholly a beast like that goat. - Quasimodo

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.

And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty.

He took his misfortune like a man - he blamed it on his wife.

It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.

Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face.

I have had a great misfortune; my dear old dog is dead.

In the beginning was belief, foolish belief, and faith, empty faith, and illusion, the terrible illusion. ... We believed in God, had faith in man, and lived with the illusion that in each one of us is a sacred spark from the fire of the shekinah, that each one carried in his eyes and in his soul the sign of God. This was the source—if not the cause—of all our misfortune.

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.

The effect of great and inevitable misfortune is to elevate those souls which it does not deprive of all virtue.

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.

Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill-luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime.

Germany had the misfortune of becoming poisoned, first because of plenty, and then because of want.

You will find the most pronounced hatred of other nations on the lowest cultural levels. There is, though, a level where the hatred disappears completely and where one so to speak stands above the nations and where one experiences fortune or misfortune of a neighboring country as if they had happened to one's own.

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.

My misfortune is doubly painful to me because it will result in my being misunderstood. For me there can be no recreation in the company of others, no intelligent conversation, no exchange of information with peers; only the most pressing needs can make me venture into society. I am obliged to live like an outcast.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

In the lottery of life there are more prizes drawn than blanks, and to one misfortune there are fifty advantages. Despondency is the most unprofitable feeling a man can indulge in.

There is nothing more difficult than tactical maneuvering. The difficult consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain. Thus, to take a long and circuitous route after enticing the enemy out of the way, and though starting after him to contrive to reach the goal before him, shows knowledge of the artifice of deviation.

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Any misfortune that happens to another person is funny. If it happens to someone else and not me, it's very funny.

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

The vital consideration of incentives is almost systematically overlooked in the proposals of agitators for more and bigger government welfare schemes. We should all be concerned about the plight of the poor and unfortunate. But the hard two-part question that any plan for relieving poverty must answer is: How can we mitigate the penalties of failure and misfortune without undermining the incentives to effort and success.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

My appeal to the rich is, Deal liberally with your poor brethren, and use your means to advance the cause of God. The worthy poor, who are made poor by misfortune and sickness, deserve your especial care and help.

To this day, I fondly recall the challenges of building a fire, pitching a tent, climbing a New England mountain, canoeing on a lake. Camp songs still resonate inside me. Competition exists at Keewaydin, of course, but nobody fails summer camp, a nice respite from winters of fortune and misfortune at school.

Some men make a womanish complaint that it is a great misfortune to die before our time. I would ask what time? Is it that of Nature? But she, indeed, has lent us life, as we do a sum of money, only no certain day is fixed for payment. What reason then to complain if she demands it at pleasure, since it was on this condition that you received it.

This is the crux of the moral pessimists: if they really wanted to promote their neighbor's redemption, then they would have to resolve themselves to spoiling existence for him, and thus to being his misfortune; out of pity, they would have to--become evil!

Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

A man's usefulness depends on his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.

Who has not experienced how, on near acquaintance, plainness becomes beautified, and beauty loses its charm, exactly according to the quality of the heart and mind? And from this cause am I of opinion that the want of outward beauty never disquiets a noble nature or will be regarded as a misfortune. It never can prevent people from being amiable and beloved in the highest degree.

Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him: because evil is but a chance misfortune, an illness, a devilish reverie. But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement.

There are many self-help books by Ph.D.s, but I hold a different degree: an I.B.T.I.A.-I've Been Through It All. This degree comes not on parchment but gauze, and it entitles me to tell you that there is a way to get through any misfortune.

I wanted us to go to the Tories when we were strong...not in misfortune to be made an honest woman of.

If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.