Misery Quotes

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

It is fear that is the greatest cause of misery in the world.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

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.

Misery is the end of those with unbridled mouths.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

To be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

The more weapons of violence, the more misery to mankind. The triumph of violence ends in a festival of mourning.

We get caught. How? Not by what we give but by what we expect. We get misery in return for our love: not from the fact that we love but from the fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure. Desires must bring misery.

The remembrance of past misery is sweet.

There is an excess both in happiness and misery above our power of sensation.

There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.

Joie est mon caractere, C'est la faute a Voltaire; Misere est mon trousseau C'est la faute a Rousseau. [Joy is my character, 'Tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau 'Tis the fault of Rousseau.] - Gavroche

A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space.

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

We have already discovered the fact that fear is the chief reason for poverty and failure and misery that takes on a thousand different forms. We have already discovered the fact that the man who masters fear may march on to successful achievement in practically any undertaking, despite all efforts to defeat him.

Weakness is constant strain and misery: weakness is death.

Here is a thing which the more you fear and avoid it the nearer you approach to it, and this is misery; the more you flee from it the more miserable and restless you will become.

And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable.

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch.

It is with an old love as it is with old age a man lives to all the miseries, but is dead to all the pleasures.

My life is one demd horrid grind.

Happiness perches on misery. Misery crouches beneath happiness.

I think that humanity brings much misery on itself by the false value they put on things.

You can either keep walking in misery or make the decision to begin taking steps out of it.

Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. A tree does not know itself wretched. It is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise sucha paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

The childless escape much misery.

The weak have no place here, in this life or any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to all kinds of misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death.

Miserable people focus on what they hate about their life. Happy people focus on what they love about their life.

Be not afraid of anything. You will do marvellous work. It is fear that is the great cause of misery in the world. It is fear that is the greatest of all superstitions. It is fear that is the cause of all our woes, and it is fearlessness that brings heaven even in a moment. Therefore, "arise, awake and stop not until the goal is reached.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

All the miseries of mankind come from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone.

Bold words and bolder deeds are what we want. Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep?

Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.

Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.

War has been avoided from a due sense of the miseries, and the demoralization it produces, and of the superior blessings of a state of peace and friendship with all mankind.

The general desire of men to live by their heads rather than their hands, and the strong allurements of great cities to those who have any turn for dissipation, threaten to make them here, as in Europe, the sinks of voluntary misery.

I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.

The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.

...there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les miserables

O wretched state! o bosom black as death!

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

Few things are needful to make the wise man happy, but nothing satisfies the fool; - and this is the reason why so many of mankind are miserable.

The miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

War is no strife To the dark house and the detested wife.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

Sick in the world's regard, wretched and low.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.

Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.