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Quotes About Misery

It was a long time since any one had spoken to him as kindly as Mrs Hale. Most people were either indifferent to his troubles, or disposed to think it natural that a young fellow of his age should have carried without repining the burden of three crippled lives. But Mrs Hale had said 'You've had an awful mean time, Ethan Frome,' and he felt less alone with his misery.
~ Edith Wharton
All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.
~ Edith Wharton
But there was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.
~ Edith Wharton
Roosevelt could not help but be affected by the Chairman's worried mood. Before their meeting on 3 August he had been confident of a Republican victory in November, but after it he wrote gloomily to Cecil Spring Rice, "If Bryan wins, we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American republic Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Bryan closely resembles Thomas Jefferson, whose accession to the Presidency was a terrible blow to this nation."21
~ Edmund Morris
Ah lucklesse babe, borne vnder cruell starre, And in dead parents balefull ashes bred, Full litle weenest thou, what sorrowes are Left thee for portion of thy liuelihed, Poore Orphane in the wide world scattered, As budding braunch rent from the natiue tree, And throwen forth, till it be withered: Such is the state of men: thus enter wee Into this life with woe, and end with miseree.
~ Edmund Spenser
O what auailes it of immortall seed To beene ybred and neuer borne to die? Farre better I it deeme to die with speed, Then waste in woe and wailefull miserie. Who dyes the vtmost dolour doth abye, But who that liues, is left to waile his losse: So life is losse, and death felicitie. Sad life worse then glad death: and greater crosse To see friends graue, then dead the graue selfe to engrosse.
~ Edmund Spenser
Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
~ Edward Gibbon
Qué representa esa rueda? —preguntó Pentecost. —Es la rueda de la fortuna, señor —contestó el padre. —¿Y qué significa eso, buen hombre? —Pues que aunque un hombre alcance fama y fortuna, puede volver a caer en la miseria. O al revés. Significa que la vida es como una rueda, señor, que no cesa de girar. Y nos enseña que debemos ser humildes, señor. Pues aunque lleguemos muy alto, podemos caer muy bajo.
~ Edward Rutherfurd
Everything turns inward in depression. A beautiful flower momentarily catches your attention, but within seconds the focus bends back into your own misery. You see loved ones who are celebrating a recent blessing, but before you can synchronize your feelings with theirs, you have doubled back to your own personal emptiness. Like a boomerang that always returns, no matter how hard you try, you can't get away from yourself.
~ Edward T. Welch
When we first listen to depression, we find that the misery is consuming. It doesn't point anywhere or say anything. It just is. But when we keep listening, it tells stories of loss, rejection, or other events that happened to the person. It speaks of identifiable physiological problems. It points to a culture of irony: the culture with the most peace, money, and leisure is also the one with the most malignant sadness.
~ Edward T. Welch
Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
~ Edwidge Danticat
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
~ Albert Camus
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.
~ Albert Camus
hamlet of Hampton and there get as nearly drunk as his funds would permit. It was his only surcease. And as a rule, it was a poor one. For seldom did he have enough ready money to buy wholesale forgetfulness. More often he was able to purchase only enough hard cider or fuseloil whisky to make him dull and vaguely miserable.
~ Albert Payson Terhune
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.
~ Aldous Huxley
My dancing is only entertainment for rich people who applaud as long as you don't show them anything real. I mean, human misery and the industrial devastation of the planet. I've been training my entire life for an audience that requires beauty without truth. I've submerged myself in myself, becoming an island of form without mind, in an exhibition of naïve vanity. The
~ Alejandro Jodorowsky
For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World" (179).
~ Alejo Carpentier
Through it all, they kept pecking at one another, as is too often the case with fellows in misfortune.
~ Alessandro Manzoni
Perhaps her giant bright-eyed sister had finally come to put her out of her misery just when things had gotten interesting.
~ Alethea Kontis
If we stop short and grow not, woe to us; for failure in all things, and specially in religion, is misery. If we be comparatively unfruitful, we may not be absolutely unhappy, but we can never know the fulness of joy; for it is only to the faithful servant that the words are spoken: "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.
~ Alexander Balmain Bruce
The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, is the cause of Man's error and misery.
~ Alexander Pope
Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.
~ Steven Pinker
When the soul, through its own fault... becomes rooted in a pool of pitch-black, evil smelling water, it produces nothing but misery and filth.
~ Saint Teresa of Avila
My tears will keep no channel, know no laws to guide their streams, but like the waves, their cause, run with disturbance till they swallow me as a description of his misery.
~ John Cleveland