Ideals are a curse because they prevent you from thinking directly, simply and truly, when you are faced with facts. The ideal, the what should be, is an escape from what is. The what is is the fact that you are afraid—afraid of what your parents will say, of what people will think, afraid of society, afraid of disease, death; and if you face what is, look at it, go into it even though it brings you misery, and understand it, then you will find that your mind becomes extraordinarily simple, clear; and in that very clarity there is the cessation of fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
—Eleanor Roosevelt
To get an idea of our fellow countrymen's miseries we have only to look at their pleasures.
—George Eliot
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
—Woody Allen
Despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation.
—Tom Robbins
Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too.
—Lemony Snicket in The Blank Book
A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw
Even for our enemies in misery, there should be tears in our eyes.
—Charan Singh
I can see from your utter misery, from your eagerness to misunderstand each other, and from your thoroughly bad temper that this is the real thing.
—Peter Ustinov
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it.
—Alice Munro
There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.
—Vaclav Havel
He's turned his life around. He used to be miserable and depressed; now he's depressed and miserable.
—David Frost
Cruelty is easy, and it breeds only misery. Kindness is harder, and you have to be brave to give it. To be cruel, you can stay closed off from everyone, wear a mask, but to be kind, in essence, to show love, you have to make yourself vulnerable, show your true self to someone and open yourself up to rejection.
—L.H. Cosway in The Nature of Cruelty
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time.
—Edith Wharton
I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
—Edith Wharton