Quotes About Wretchedness

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. . . . Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us; the other softens us. They

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of the wretchedness of man's situation, and poured scorn on all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

Every child has the spirit of creation. The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a souls own wretchedness.

And be very careful at the front, Paul." Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

My voice came out high and strange, and sticky with wretchedness: 'Why? I know about having to - *invite* - one of your kind.' For about six months when you're thirteen or fourteen it's every teenage girl's favourite story: because it's about finding out you have *power*.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign wretchedness of man, used by Pascal.

Children make parents as wretched as parents make children; but children do not really believe that. They can't understand how it is that those whom they take for tyrants can be hurt by the victims of the tyranny.

Surely, of all creatures that have life and will, we women are the most wretched. When, for an extravagant sum, we have bought a husband, we must then accept him as possessor of our body.

Anyone not wanting to sink in the wretchedness of the finite is obliged in the most profound sense to struggle with the infinite.

The best proof adduced of the wretchedness of life is that derived from contemplating its glory.

The most durable monument of human labor is that which recalls the wretchedness and nothingness of man.

Men are much more forcibly struck by those inequalities which exist within the circle of the same class, than with those which may be remarked between different classes. It is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness.

The arrogance of wealth and the dejection of wretchedness, capital cities of unwonted extent, a lax morality, a vulgar egotism, and a great confusion of interests, are the dangers which almost invariably arise from the magnitude of States.

Men's wretchedness in soothe I so deplore, Not even I would plague the sorry creatures more.

Alike to the slave and his oppressor cometh night with sweet refreshment, and half of the life of the most wretched is gladdened by the soothings of sleep.

The Giver of life gave it for happiness and not for wretchedness.

A great proportion of the wretchedness which has embittered married life, has originated in a negligence of trifles.

Reasons for anxiety will never be lacking, whether born of prosperity or of wretchedness; life pushes on in a succession of engrossments. We shall always pray for leisure.

He wrote more or less the same way as he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust, and wretchedness. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try to understand why people hurt each other, and themselves, without meaning to at all.

when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.

I have so much to endure! Have men before me ever been so wretched?

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal,' de Tocqueville wrote, 'but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.

I do not think of myself as having arrived at any degree of achievement commensurate with my potential talent and capacity for work. I am just one among the many who have tried to approximate some measure of integrity in a world that is a sorry bewilderment of wretchedness and affluence.