Quotes About Contrast

I'm not a big proponent of happiness. I think it's highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There's so much value in that. You can't have one without the other.

Humans have a sense of spontaneity and emotion. We have a dichotomy between grief and happiness.

This idea of perpetual happiness is crazy and overrated, because those dark moments fuel you for the next bright moments; each one helps you appreciate the other.

I feel the happiest when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.

How would you know what happy is if you've never been otherwise.

I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.

If you have no tragedy, you have no comedy. Crying and laughing are the same emotion. If you laugh too hard, you cry. And vice versa.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

Misery is what happiness rests upon. Happiness is what misery lurks beneath.

You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".

Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.

How unbearable at times are people who are happy, people for whom everything works out.

For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy.

Joy never feasts so high as when the first course is of misery.

Alas! sorrow from happiness is oft evolved.

Happiness perches on misery. Misery crouches beneath happiness.

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality.

The house of laughter makes a house of woe.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

You can only recognize your happiness against the background of suffering.

And happiness is always louder than sadness.

Complete happiness can look so much like complete terror that it's hard to tell them apart.

I am intrigued by the smile upon your face, and the sadness within your eyes