Top 188 Misery Quotes

That’s one of the peculiar things about bad moods – we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.

Growth is usually uncomfortable. If you’re looking for comfort, you will more than likely feel tired and old earlier than you want, and the misery of your caged soul will always be looming nearby.

Attachment and aversion are the root cause of karma, and karma originates from infatuation. Karma is the root cause of birth and death, and these are said to be the source of misery. None can escape the effect of their own past karma.

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.

And I’m a really happy person, I enjoy life. I think you see that on people. I think there’s nothing more aging than misery.

Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

When the soul, through its own fault… becomes rooted in a pool of pitch-black, evil smelling water, it produces nothing but misery and filth.

The greatness of being an artist is the kind of ridiculous guffaw you can have at one’s own misery. ‘That was miserable! Now how can I write about it?’

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I’ve endured over the past twenty-five years.

Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

My life has run from misery to happiness.

I’m a bit bored of going to the gym! I’m like, ‘Someone put me out of my misery – I can’t do this anymore!’

And I’m a really happy person, I enjoy life. I think you see that on people. I think there’s nothing more aging than misery.

Climate change could produce a lot of misery and waste without necessarily leading to large-scale armed conflict, which depends more on ideology and bad governance than on resource scarcity.

I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.

Misery is the stuff of comedy, if one can just live long enough to get over it.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

The alternative to peace is war, which will expose everyone to mass casualties, misery and a loss of perspective for many years to come.

Misery loves company. This is a Hollywood soap opera, and I’m not going to be a star in another Bryant soap opera.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.

What’s important is that, when you’re tested, you stand firm against the violent activities of those who would try to plunge our people back into the misery of the past.

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.

About the only difference between the poor and the rich, is this, the poor suffer misery, while the rich have to enjoy it.

I had a difficult start to secondary school, missing the first month because of ‘Mary Poppins.’ Everyone knew who I was, who my brother was – McFly were huge by then – and had made their mind up about me. One girl made everyone’s life a misery, picking on insecurities. But that’s just teenagers.

The prosperous can not easily form a right idea of misery.

Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.

Maybe it’s the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice.

There’s never any ebb in human misery.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover, they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered.

Rather than turning away from the staggering scale and depth of misery caused by war, we must strive to develop our capacity to empathize and feel the sufferings of others.

God loves us too much to leave us in the hell of unhappiness that comes from trying to do his job. Into the slavish misery of our ladder-defined lives, God condescends.

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.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.

For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God.

I have no doubt but that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate whenever the Government assumes a freer aspect and the laws favor a subdivision of Property.

When I was seven and told my mom, ‘I’m gonna be a writer,’ she said, ‘Oh, that’s a terrible idea. You’ll live in misery and die teaching other people’s children badly.’ My parents wanted the safer path for me, and I think they failed miserably achieving that.

The characters in ‘Stella’ wake up and they want to have a good day. They don’t set out to make someone’s life a misery.

Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.

Societies can easily talk themselves into conflict and misery. But they can also talk, and act, their way out.

Capitalism, racism and inhuman technocracy quietly develop in their own way. The causes of misery are no longer to be found in the inner attitudes of men, but have long been institutionalized.

Certainly I have no attraction to misery. I don’t intentionally go for dark.

People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery.

During my freshman year of college, it became undeniably clear that I didn’t want to be great again. I correlated greatness with misery.

Our principles are the springs of our actions. Our actions, the springs of our happiness or misery. Too much care, therefore, cannot be taken in forming our principles.

This hunger for profits causes great misery for the people.

After a casual listen, it might be easy to lump Rocky Votolato in with the downtrodden likes of Conor Oberst and Elliott Smith. But his songwriting is a bit more triumphant than theirs: Votolato would rather pull himself out of a gutter than wallow in it, focusing instead on the victory before the misery.

Whenever I am faced with someone spreading negativity in my relationship, I remember the old saying, ‘Misery loves company.’ I am also reminded to be mindful of the company you keep. Sometimes you cannot see a hater until you are happy. It is then that they demonstrate their negativity.