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Quotes About Wretchedness

Blessedness, not material possessions, is the measure of right thought; wretchedness, not lack of material possessions, is the measure of wrong thought.
~ James Allen
wretchedness, not lack of material possessions, is the measure of wrong thought.
~ James Allen
Indigence and indulgence are the two extremes of wretchedness. They are both equally unnatural and the result of mental disorder. A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer, of the man with his surroundings.
~ James Allen
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.
~ James Baldwin
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.
~ James Baldwin
The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.
~ Ludwig von Mises
Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardship of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
~ Seneca the Younger
Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.
~ Thomas Carlyle
the most abject and miserable creatures I have any where beheld.
~ Laurence Bergreen
Oh, yes, his family is all very fine, Miss Summerson," replied Miss Jellyby; "but what comfort is his family to him? His family is nothing but bills, dirt, waste, noise, tumbles downstairs, confusion, and wretchedness. His scrambling home, from week's end to week's end, is like one great washing-day — only nothing's washed!
~ Charles Dickens
Cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness in all its stages, were there, in their strongest aspects; and women: some with the last lingering tinge of their early freshness, almost fading as you looked: others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime: some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of life: formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture.
~ Charles Dickens
The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.
~ Charles Fourier
Comparison, more than reality, makes men happy or wretched.
~ Thomas Fuller
Whatever the form or constitution of government may be, it ought to have no other object than the general happiness. When, instead of this, it operates to create and increase wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary.
~ Thomas Paine
Civilization, therefore, or that which is so-called, has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched,than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
~ Thomas Paine
Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing do with laws but to obey them, and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation. -Agrarian Justice
~ Thomas Paine
There's data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what's down there if you havent been down there.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchednes.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.
~ Cormac McCarthy
You have to right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.
~ Cormac McCarthy
The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored , and unsung. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
~ Walter Scott
If you want to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.
~ Charles Kingsley
The hadith states that the second sign of wretchedness is a lack of modesty or shame. Among the words revealed to humanity are, "If you feel no shame, do what you will.
~ Hamza Yusuf
One would think there was enough unavoidable tragedy in everyone's existence to keep him from seeking the hideous and unsightly," he mused. "And yet it may be the fact that each has his cross to bear that leads him to come in contact with the world's wretchedness as a sort of palliative to his own."[11]
~ Harold Schechter