Misfortune Quotes

When with all thy heart thou strivest to live with truth and love, couldst thou do anything better?... If this be thy life, thou shalt not deem it a misfortune to lack the things men most crave and toil for.

John Lancaster Spalding

I might have been your happiness, and became your misfortune. I am the cause of your death, for if I had been a different man, if I had not been wanting in all principles, all foundations of life, there would not have come upon you the shocks that killed you.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

Michel de Montaigne

Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.

Mary Shelley

[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.

Christine de Pizan

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.

Criss Jami

If I am a fool then it is no misfortune, for then only one more fool will wander this Earth. Amongst the millions of mentally deranged it would barely be noticed. But what if I am not a fool, and that science itself has erred? Then the tragedy is incalculable!

Viktor Schauberger

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

To wipe all tears from off all faces is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and

Samuel Johnson

I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter. I sometimes struggle against luck, the glory of mastering it makes me master it gaily; whereas I am sometimes surfeited in the midst of good fortune.

Blaise Pascal

If you suffer misfortunes in your life, look for their cause, not in your actions, but in the thoughts which inspired them, and try to improve these thoughts.

Leo Tolstoy

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Samuel Johnson

The rights a man arrogates to himself are related to the duties he imposes on himself, to the tasks to which he feels equal. The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The great and the humble have the same misfortunes, the same griefs, the same passions; but the one is at the top of the wheel, and the other near the center, and so less disturbed by the same revolutions.

Blaise Pascal

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Oscar Wilde

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Virginia Woolf

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

Blaise Pascal

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

Aristotle

Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

Voltaire

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato