Quotes About Misfortune

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

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

The government's War on Poverty has transformed poverty from a short-term misfortune into a career choice.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

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

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.

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of seeing me interact with house pets knows I have a wickedly strong paternal instinct bordering on the maternal.

in prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the pity of heaven!

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.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

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.

It is the task of a good man to help those in misfortune.

Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.

Those who hope to avoid all failure and misfortune are trying to live in a fairyland; wise people realistically accept failures as a part of life and build philosophies to meet them and make the best of them.

In trouble to be troubled, Is to have your trouble doubled! [People who get upset and worried at the first sign of misfortune are only making their situation worse and thereby doubling their troubles. Stay calm and happy. Cool and joyful heads are more likely to survive and prevail.]

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.

The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.

One has to handle these negative experiences alone.You can't get help from your friends or family.You're finally alone with it, and you have to come to grips with misfortune and go on.

I have yet to hear an instance where misfortune hit a man because he worked overtime. I know lots of instances where it hit men who did not.

Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.

I used to think that you could find peace and it would always be there. And there is a sense of that. But even in the worst moments, catch yourself and remember that within the storm of misfortune there is good fortune. Just get in practice with what they call in Taoism the Wu-wei; the non-action and becoming the observer of it. Just notice and stay at peace with it. I must have admit, that I still have those really disrupting moments.

But Gregor understood easily that it was not only consideration for him which prevented their moving, for he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes; what mainly prevented the family from moving was their complete hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune as none of their relatives and acquaintances had ever been hit.

A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

I do a TV show about a priest in London, and he is also slightly beleaguered and is subject to fate and misfortune and daily difficulty.

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

…misfortune was much more interesting to her than good luck.

Joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, find no place in that man's breast; for to him all creation is ONE. And all things being thus united in ONE, his body and limbs are but as dust of the earth, and life and death, beginning, and end, are but as night and day, and cannot destroy his peace. How much less such trifles as gain or loss, misfortune or good fortune?

The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

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

The memory of man is as old as misfortune

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.

Once there was a gypsy queen who wore on her wrist a chain of six lucky charms - a golden crown, a silver horse, a butterfly caught in amber, a cat's eye shell, a bolt of lightning forged from the heart of a falling star, and the flower of the rue plant, herb of grace. The queen gave each of her six children one of the charms as their lucky talisman, but ever since the chain of charms was broken, the gypsies had been dogged with misfortune.

It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again.

It is only the surprise and newness of the thing which makes that misfortune terrible which by premeditation might be made easy to us. For that which some people make light by sufferance, others do by foresight.

This great misfortune, to be incapable of solitude.

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Misfortune is never invited. And it comes and sits at the table without permission and it eats, leaving nothing but bones.