Best Misery Quotes

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery.

Remember, no more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity, than is required to accept misery and poverty.

Religion is based … mainly upon fear … fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. 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.

The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.

Look at your own experiences; your bliss from success never lasts, nor does your misery from failure

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional

No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like the scene on Calvary. Nowhere does the soul find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax.

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell’s matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one’s own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.

Do nothing in a depressed mood, nor as one afflicted, nor as thinking that you are in misery, for no one compels you to that.

the leading error of the human mind, – the bane of human happiness – the perverter of human virtue … is Religion – that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion – that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion – that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion – that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world!

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

Our economic order is tightly woven around the exploitation of animals, and while it may seem easy to dismiss concern about animals as the soft-headed mental masturbation of people who really don’t understand oppression and the depths of actual human misery, I hope to get you to think differently about suffering and pain, to convince you that animals matter, and to argue that anyone serious about ending domination and hierarchy needs to think critically about bringing animals into consideration.

Those who have courage and faith shall never perish in misery

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.

I simply can’t build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death… I think… peace and tranquillity will return again.

Mistrusts sometimes come over one’s mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?

Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.

The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people’s miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they cannot be modified by comparison to others.

Communities tend to be guided less than individuals by conscience and a sense of responsibility. How much misery does this fact cause mankind! It is the source of wars and every kind of oppression, which fill the earth with pain, sighs and bitterness.

There is no shortage of ways that people profit indirectly from the misery and cruelty in other places. Even now, the shirts we wear and the tomatoes we eat. There are unfortunately unfair and inhumane conditions – including literal slavery – all over the world.

Not, not mine: it’s somebody else’s wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

I think that humanity brings much misery on itself by the false value they put on things.

My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up – not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.