Our pleasures are mostly imagined, but our griefs real. [ Proverb ]

There can hardly, I believe, be imagined a more desirable pleasure than that of praise unmixed with any possibility of flattery. [ Steele ]

Of many imagined blessings it may be doubted whether he that wants or possesses them had more reason to be satisfied with his lot. [ Dr. Johnson ]

He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind. [ Montaigne ]

If there remains an eternity to us after the short revolution of time we so swiftly run over here, it is clear that all the happiness that can be imagined in this fleeting state is not valuable in respect of the future. [ Locke ]

A broken heart is a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bills of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases, namely, that no physicians can cure it. [ Fielding ]

Evil, what we call evil, must ever exist while man exists; evil, in the widest sense we can give it, is precisely the dark, disordered material out of which man's freewill has to create an edifice of order and good. Ever must pain urge us to labour; and only in free effort can any blessedness be imagined for us. [ Carlyle ]

Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. [ Shenstone ]

Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]