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Quotes About Unhappiness

Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
~ Peter Sloterdijk
Glück malt man mit Punkten, Unglück mit Strichen", sagte sie. "Du musst, wenn du unser Glück beschreiben willst, ganz viele kleine Punkte machen wie Seurat. Und dass es Glück war, wird man erst aus der Distanz sehen.
~ Peter Stamm
It is the pursuit of happiness that makes people unhappy.
~ Piero Scaruffi
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
~ Jon Krakauer
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy
~ Jon Krakauer
brooding on a Colorado barstool, picking unhappily at my existential scabs
~ Jon Krakauer
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a person than a secure future.
~ Jon Krakauer
And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He
~ Jon Ronson
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.
~ Jon Ronson
My father had always been supremely suspicious of psychiatry. He viewed therapy as an invasion of privacy, mental health as a matter of self-discipline , and my mother's increasingly pointed suggestions that he talk to someone as acts of aggression - little lobbed grenades of blame for their unhappiness as a couple.
~ Jonathan Franzen
Through constant creation of dissatisfaction, the consumer society is in fact a highly sophisticated mechanism for the production and distribution of unhappiness. That
~ Jonathan Sacks
All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that's at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye. Jacob
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Brod's life was a slow realisation that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Ik geloof dat je een enorm belang hecht aan geluk - van jezelf en anderen - en ongelukkig zijn zo bedreigend vindt dat je liever met het hele schip naar de kelder gaat dan toegeeft dat er een lek in zit.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that's at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
She was unhappy, although unconvinced that her unhappiness wouldn't be someone else's happiness. She felt unfulfilled desire—profound amounts of it—but presumably so did every other married and unmarried person. She wanted more, but didn't know if there was more to be found. Not knowing used to feel inspiring. It felt like faith. Now it felt agnostic. Like not knowing.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
You westerners are the ones we can't understand. God has given you so much, you have been so blessed…why are so many people in your country so unhappy?
~ Joni Eareckson Tada
The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.
~ A. E. Houseman
All crimes, all hatreds, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness.
~ A. S. Neill
I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; - from Poem XLI
~ A.E. Housman
The difficult child is the child who is unhappy. He is at war with himself; and in consequence, he is at war with the world.
~ A.S. Neill
I haven't the strength to be happy, she wants to say. I can hardly even manage to be unhappy.
~ Ã…sa Larsson
The more you try to push a child's unhappy feelings away, the more he becomes stuck in them. The more comfortably you can accept the bad feelings, the easier it is for kids to let go of them. I guess you could say that if you want to have a happy family you'd better be prepared to permit the expression of a lot of unhappiness.
~ Adele Faber
The happiness visible in the eye of the thinker is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency towards suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails. Thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Who ever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him, has not resigned.
~ Adorno Theodor