Misfortunes Quotes - Page 29

• And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

  Boris Pasternak

  Remember You, Remembers You, Despair

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• So here we are, talking about Roman unicycles and alien sandwiches and my sister’s Italian misfortunes, while hanging in between us is: MY EPIC FAILURE TO CARPE. What’s wrong with me?

  Laini Taylor

  Epic, Italian, Talking

  Laini Taylor (2017). “Night of Cake and Puppets: A Daughter of Smoke and Bone Novella”, p.126, Hachette UK

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• All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Smart, Yoga

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• Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.

  Seneca the Younger

  Happiness, Failure, Adversity

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• In such misfortunes my Mother was of an heroic spirit, in suffering patiently when there was no remedy, and being industrious where she thought she could help.

  Margaret Cavendish

  Mother, Suffering, Literature

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• If you would reflect well and wisely, you would realize that those events you regard as personal misfortunes have served a useful purpose even in this worldly life, and indeed have worked for your betterment.

  Christine de Pizan

  Worldly Life, Events, Purpose

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• The Unhappy may, possibly, by indulging Thought, hit on some lucky Stratagem for the Relief of his Misfortunes, and the Happy may be infinitely more so by contemplating on his Condition.

  Eliza Haywood

  Unhappy, Relief, Lucky

  Eliza Haywood (1999). “Selections from The Female Spectator”, p.60, Oxford University Press

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• The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Desire, Complaining, Culture

  Alexander McCall Smith (2008). “The World According to Bertie”, p.19, Anchor

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• The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.

  Martin Seligman

  Believe, Thinking, Opposites

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• When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

  Denis Diderot

  Imagination, Strange, Breathe

  Denis Diderot (1966). “Selected Writings”, New York : Macmillan

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• It ought to be considered a great misfortune, not only for individuals, but also for Houses and Congregations, to have everything in conformity with their wishes; to go on quietly, and to suffer nothing for the love of God. Yes, consider it certain that a person or a Congregation that does not suffer and is applauded by all the world is near a fall.

  St. Vincent

  Fall, House, Suffering

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• CALAMITY, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Life, Two, Kind

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.31, University of Georgia Press

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• Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners.

  Daniel Dennett

  Life, Spring, Perspective

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• When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Years, Careers

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• Everybody has their days of misfortune.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Louisa May Alcott (1873). “An Old-fashioned Girl”, p.141

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• Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Jesus, Reality

  Pope Francis (2014). “The Joy of the Gospel”, p.76, BookBaby

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• Unless some misfortune has made it impossible, everyone can have good posture.

  Loretta Young

  Impossible, Posture, Made

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• Jew and Gentile are two worlds, between you Gentiles and us Jews there lies an unbridgeable gulf...There are two life forces in the world Jewish and Gentile...I do not believe that this primal difference between Gentile and Jew is reconcilable...The difference between us is abysmal...You might say: 'Well, let us exist side by side and tolerate each other. We will not attack your morality, nor you ours.' But the misfortune is that the two are not merely different; they are opposed in mortal enmity. No man can accept both, or, accepting either, do otherwise than despise the other.

  Maurice Samuel

  Lying, Believe, Men

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• I'm becoming more squeamish. I didn't use to be - nine years of 'Silent Witness' prepared me for most things one will have the misfortune to see in life. Before, I'd be wading up to my neck in gore, but now I tend to look away.

  Amanda Burton

  Years, Looks, Use

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• Cheerfulness can change misfortune into love and friends.

  Louisa May Alcott

  Cheerfulness

  Louisa May Alcott (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott (Illustrated)”, p.2238, Delphi Classics

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• Adversity is a good test of our resiliency, our ability to cope, to stand back up, to recover from misfortune. Adversity is a painful pedagogue.

  Charles R. Swindoll

  Adversity, Tests, Painful

  Charles R. Swindoll (1994). “Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life”, p.405, Zondervan

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• Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

  Albert Camus

  Elements, Unreality, Abstraction

  "The Plague". Book by Albert Camus, 1947.

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• I've built many doorways and set out traps so that no one will be able to reach this place. That's what the angel said. This is a castle of darkness for the angel and I alone. Only within this yielding gloom can I lament the misfortune that has rained down all around me, only here am I permitted to scorn and pity the ugliness, the filthiness of how I smile and pretend at being pure in the light of day.

  Mizuki Nomura

  Angel, Light, Darkness

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• Sometimes I joke that I'm an Elizabethan who's had the misfortune to be alive during the reign of the wrong Elizabeth.

  George Fetherling

  Alive, Reign, Sometimes

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• We bear, all of us, the misfortunes of other people with heroic constancy.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  People, Bears, Heroic

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