#misery

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

— Martha Washington

#depends #dispositions #greater #happiness #misery

Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others. ↗

— Beatrice Webb

#bring #classes #fact #great #individuals

I thought I saw him for what he was-or what I thought he was. And he was talented, no doubt about that. But, he thought his talent was based on misery and that if he became happy it would just go. He believed that. ↗

— Fay Wray

#based #became #believed #doubt #go

I never realized that life could be as difficult for a beautiful woman as it is for a plain one,” he said. “Life can be difficult for everyone,” she replied. “Misery makes no distinction between prince and pauper. ↗

— Patricia Grasso

#life #misery #beauty

If peace comes from seeing the whole, then misery stems from a loss of perspective. We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe. Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening? It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like. When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first. In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter. ↗

— Mark Nepo

#enlightenment #happiness #joy #mark-nepo #misery

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

— Matthew Arnold

#himself #his #know #loses #misery

Margarita was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a shared flat. In short... was she happy? Not for a moment. ↗

— Mikhail Bulgakov

#friends #happiness #husband #inspirational #life

That’s what love is like: mother of the greatest bliss and stepmother of the most tragic misery. ↗

— Stefanos Livos

#happiness #love #misery #mother #sadness

When that bastard calls back, you tell him he’s won this round. I’ll marry him. But I don’t take well to being blackmailed, and tell him I intend to spend the rest of my life making him miserable, got that? ↗

— Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#life #marriage #misery #life

I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide. ↗

— Voltaire

#voltaire #misery