Quotes About Misery

Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.

He says he's going to die. He's got a what do you call it? A premonition. He says it's because he's going to be married.' 'What's that got to do with it?' Price shrugged as if to demonstrate that he was no expert on superstitions. 'He says it's because he's happy. He reckons that the happiest die first and only the miserable buggers live for ever.

Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not. The suffering was personal, painful, and possibly endless.

Extreme hopes are born from extreme misery.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.

I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

In relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked: (1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.

It is discouraging that many of the precepts whose sacred character is thus uncritically acknowledged should be such as to inflict much wholly unnecessary misery. If men's kindly impulses were stronger, they would find some way of explaining that these precepts are not to be taken literally, any more than the command to "sell all that thou hast and give to the poor.

went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

If we had created rules to automatically turn up the required down payment on a home when there's a housing bubble, or just say that the mortgage on a property cannot be larger than the value of the property three years ago, the amount of human misery that would've been avoided would've been enormous.

In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.

I guess lyrically they're similar because they're talking about escaping the kind of misery that likes company. 'The Last One Alive,' for me, is very simple. It's just about alienation, really, that causes anger.

What does Resistance feel like?   First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless. We can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

It is that peculiar soldiers' humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship.

What does Resistance feel like? First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless. We can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We're bored, we're restless. We can't get no satisfaction. There's guilt but we can't put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We're disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

I asked what he was laughing at. "I was just wondering if it was possible to get any more miserable." He chuckled darkly. "I suppose if a river snake crawled up my ass and gave birth to quintuplets…

A good tutor can make one's college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery.

Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based on free people, not free enterprise.

The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmental agencies' and elected officials' lying to the public for decades. Read the Brookings Institution's list "Government's Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014"; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.

behind the mask of indifference is bottomless misery and behind apparent callousness, despair.

Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty."10

I could make do with that misery and take my solace from the water.

The greatest sorrow, said Dante, was to recall in misery the time when we were happy. The sadness of a lost happy time.