Misery Quotes - Page 35

• How many people does each of us know who claim to seek happiness but freely choose paths inevitably leading to misery?

  Theodore Dalrymple

  People, Doe, Path

  Theodore Dalrymple (2005). “Our Culture, What's Left of it: The Mandarins and the Masses”, Ivan R Dee

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• Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, happiness rather than misery.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hysteria, Creating, Feelings

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• The association of Mount Ararat and Noah, the staunch Christians who were massacred periodically by the Mohammedan Turks, and the Sunday School collections over fifty years for alleviating their miseries-all cumulate to impress the name Armenia on the front of the American mind.

  Herbert Hoover

  Christian, School, Sunday

  Herbert Hoover (1952). “Memoirs: Years of adventure, 1874-1920”

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• Misery is the only thing in the world that has no end or edge.

  Irving Stone

  World, Worth Fighting For, Ends

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• Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Atheism, Doctrine, Asceticism

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• The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial system can do more for himself and his kind than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance, and submission have done.

  Emma Goldman

  Ignorance, Humanity, Atheism

  Emma Goldman (1913). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of the people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

  Emma Goldman

  Christian, Jesus, Philosophical

  Emma Goldman (1915). “Mother Earth, a Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Social Science and Literature”

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• You see misery, you see misfortune, you see pain, you see suffering. It's all part of the fatalistic way of looking at life.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Pain, Suffering, Way

  "Ravi Zacharias: Christian apologist proclaims a reasonable faith". Interview with Anthony C. Hayes, baltimorepostexaminer.com. May 24, 2015.

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• The gap between rich and poor is, in fact, widening enormously. This idea of building up the powers of people who are already powerful and keeping everyone else back is a recipe for endless misery and conflict.

  Robert Wyatt

  Powerful, Building Up, Ideas

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. November 14, 2014.

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• I do not wonder that British youth is in revolt against the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries; that what used to be called the submerged tenth can only be rescued by bringing the other nine-tenths down to their le.

  Winston Churchill

  Matter, Nine, Doctrine

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• Marriage enlarges the Scene of our Happiness and Miseries.

  Joseph Addison

  Marriage, Scene

  Joseph Addison (1856). “The works of ... Joseph Addison, with notes by R. Hurd”, p.169

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• Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while they enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grind-stone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty.

  Herman Melville

  Appreciation, Acceptance, Political

  Herman Melville (2012). “The Encantadas and Other Stories”, p.83, Courier Corporation

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• Philosophy can add to our happiness in no other manner but by diminishing our misery; it should not pretend to increase our present stock, but make us economists of what we are possessed of. Happy were we all born philosophers; all born with a talent of thus dissipating our own cares by spreading them upon all mankind.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Philosophy, Care, Add

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “Enquiry into the present state of polite learning. The citizen of the world”, p.234

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• Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

  Mason Cooley

  Ideas, Arise, Begging

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• Love Songs Now: Fewer broken hearts, more sexual misery.

  Mason Cooley

  Love, Song, Heart

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• What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Long, Joy

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.

  Edward Gibbon

  Humanity, Sorrow, Cottages

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.24

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• There is no sin so profound, no despondency so low, no misery so abject, but the love of Christ is deeper.

  F.B. Meyer

  Profound, Sin, Christ

  F.B. Meyer (1953). “Fifteen Key Studies from the Heart of Ephesians: A Topical Commentary by One of the Great Bibles Scholars of Our Age”, p.29, BookBaby

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• Pride is a deeply rooted ailment of the soul. The penalty is misery; the remedy lies in the sincere, life-long cultivation of humility, which means true self-evaluation and a proper perspective toward past, present and future.

  Robert Gordis

  Lying, Mean, Humility

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• Those who wander in the world avowedly and purposely in pursuit of happiness, who view every scene of present joy with an eye to what may succeed, certainly are more liable to disappointment, misfortune and unhappiness, than those who give up their fate to chance and take the goods and evils of fortune as they come, without making happiness their study, or misery their foresight.

  Fanny Burney

  Happiness, Disappointment, Giving Up

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.3747, Delphi Classics

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• For what mission can be greater than that of giving to the world hours of exaltation in which it may forget the misery of the present, the cares of everyday life and lose itself in the eternally pure world of harmony. . .

  Lotte Lehmann

  Giving, Everyday, Exaltation

  Lotte Lehmann (2013). “More Than Singing: The Interpretation of Songs”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas' mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
  Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.

  Jacques Roumain

  Taken, Sacrifice, Alcohol

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• You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.

  Umberto Eco

  Betrayal, Hate, Passion

  Umberto Eco (2011). “The Prague Cemetery”, p.355, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• While the Second World War brought about untold misery and suffering, it was also a time when the world witnessed extraordinary bravery. Through the collective, heroic efforts of countless men and women, victory was claimed over tyranny and evil.

  Sam Kutesa

  War, Men, Evil

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• You yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Mean, Thinking, Goal

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