Love - sweet misery! [ A. de Musset ]

One more Unfortunate
Weary of breath.
Rashly importunate.
Gone to her death. [ Hood ]

The miserable are sacred. [ Seneca ]

Long life hath long misery. [ Proverb ]

Tears are due to human misery. [ Virgil ]

False fancy brings real misery. [ Schiller ]

Life and misery began together. [ Proverb ]

Misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case. [ Cowper ]

Company in misery makes it light. [ Proverb ]

He that is down need fear no fall. [ Bunyan ]

Misery makes sport to mock itself. [ William Shakespeare ]

Every one that flatters thee,
Is no friend in misery;
Words are easy, like the wind,
Faithful friends are hard to find. [ Shakespeare ]

Oblivion: a remedy for human misery. [ A. de Musset ]

Wherever we meet misery, we owe pity. [ Proverb ]

A poor wedding is a prologue to misery. [ Proverb ]

One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow. [ William Shakespeare ]

Nothing is a misery,
Unless our weakness apprehend it so:
We cannot be more faithful to ourselves,
In anything that's manly, than to make
Ill-fortune as contemptible to us
As it makes us to others. [ Beaumont and Fletcher ]

He bears misery best that hides it most. [ Proverb ]

What is this world? thy school, O Misery! [ Young ]

Half our misery from our foibles springs. [ Hannah More ]

But through the heart
Should Jealousy its venom once diffuse
'Tis then delightful misery no more
But agony unmixed, incessant gall
Corroding every thought, and blasting all
Love's paradise. [ Thomson ]

Idleness is the parent of vice and misery. [ Proverb ]

A God still lives who thinks of my misery. [ Chamisso ]

Misery is everywhere, and so is happiness. [ Boufflers ]

The memory of happiness makes misery woeful. [ Proverb ]

Do not insult calamity:
It is a barbarous grossness to lay on
The weight of scorn, where heavy misery
Too much already weighs men's fortunes down. [ Daniel ]

Death is the port where all may refuge find,
The end of labor, entry into rest;
Death hath the bounds of misery confin'd
Whose sanctuary shrouds affliction best. [ Earl of Stirling ]

A little evil contributes more to our misery. [ Proverb ]

Since trifles make the sum of human things,
And half our misery from our foibles springs. [ Hannah More ]

Yet is there one more cursed than they all.
That canker-worm, that monster, jealousie,
Which eats the heart and feeds upon the gall,
Turning all love's delight to misery.
Through fear of losing his felicity. [ Spenser ]

Can wealth give happiness? look round, and see
What gay distress! what splendid misery!
Whatever fortune lavishly can pour.
The mind annihilates, and calls for more. [ Young ]

When sorrows come, they come not single spies,
But in battalions. [ William Shakespeare ]

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. [ William Shakespeare ]

O happiness of blindness! now no beauty
Inflames my lust; no other's goods my envy,
Or misery my pity; no man's wealth
Draws my respect; nor poverty my scorn,
Yet still I see enough! man to himself
Is a large prospect, raised above the level
Of his low creeping thoughts; if then I have
A world within myself, that world shall be
My empire; there I'll reign, commanding freely,
And willingly obeyed, secure from fear
Of foreign forces, or domestic treasons. [ Denham ]

Sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine.
But live content, which is the calmest life;
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and excessive, overturns All patience. [ Milton ]

For fate has wove the thread of life with pain,
And twins even from the birth are misery and man. [ Pope ]

It is in worldly accidents.
As in the world itself, where things most distant
Meet one another: Thus the east and west.
Upon the globe a mathematical point
Only divides: Thus happiness and misery.
And all extremes, are still contiguous. [ Denham ]

Pride in prosperity turns to misery in adversity. [ Proverb ]

It is a most sad sight to see an old man in misery. [ Proverb ]

God hath yoked to guilt her pale tormentor, - misery. [ Bryant ]

Behold, we live through all things, - famine, thirst,
Bereavement, pain; all grief and misery.
All woe and sorrow; life inflicts its worst
On soul and body, - but we cannot die.
Though we be sick, and tired, and faint, and worn, -
Lo, all things can be borne! [ Elizabeth Akers Allen ]

Man is only miserable so far as be thinks himself so. [ Sannazaro ]

The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery. [ George Eliot ]

It is not I who die, when I die, but my sin and misery. [ Gotthold ]

Trifles make up the happiness or misery of mortal life. [ Alex. Smith ]

When a few words will rescue misery out of her distress,
I hate the man who can be a churl of them. [ Sterne ]

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. [ Alexander Smith ]

There is more poverty in the human heart than misery in life. [ E. de Girardin ]

He who has not the spirit of his age has all the misery of it. [ Voltaire ]

And let me tell you that every misery I miss is a new blessing. [ Izaak Walton ]

To live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery. [ Hooker ]

Joy never feasts so high as when the first course is of misery. [ Suckling ]

Too much effort to increase our happiness transforms it into misery. [ J. J. Rousseau ]

Despair gives the finishing blow not only to misery, but to weakness. [ Vauvenargues ]

No greater grief than to remember days of joy when misery is at hand. [ Dante ]

God created in our misery the kisses of children for the tears of mothers. [ E. Legouve ]

Kings and mightiest potentates must die, For that's the end of human misery. [ William Shakespeare ]

Misery and misfortune is all one; and of misfortune fortune hath only the gift [ Sir P. Sidney ]

A faithful friend is better than gold; a medicine of misery, an only possession. [ Miss L. Barton ]

The gods from heaven survey the fatal strife, and mourn the miseries of human life. [ Dryden ]

Men are as much blinded by the extremes of misery as by the extremes of prosperity. [ Burke ]

Happiness and misery are the names of two extremes, the utmost bounds whereof we know not. [ Locke ]

I know that we often tremble at an empty terror; yet the false fancy brings a real misery. [ Schiller ]

This iron world brings down the stoutest hearts to lowest state; for misery doth bravest minds abate. [ Spenser ]

Miserable men commiserate not themselves; bowelless unto others, and merciless unto their own bowels. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]

Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy, and the dividing of our grief. [ Cicero ]

I would not anticipate the relish of any happiness, nor feel the weight of any misery, before it actually arrives. [ Spectator ]

Wealth hath never given happiness, but often hastened misery; enough hath never caused misery but often quickened happiness. [ Tupper ]

The mind is the master over every kind of fortune: itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery. [ Seneca ]

Art needs solitude or misery or passion. Lukewarm zephyrs wilt it. It is a rock-flower flourishing by stormy blasts and in stony soil. [ Alex. Dumas ]

There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples. [ O. W. Holmes ]

Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels. [ Addison ]

Employment, which Galen calls nature's physician, is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery. [ Burton ]

Wickedness is a wonderfully diligent architect of misery, of shame, accompanied with terror, and commotion, and remorse, and endless perturbation. [ Plutarch ]

Misery is caused for the most part, not by a heavy crash of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, which canker enjoyment and undermine security. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. [ Dr. Johnson ]

This poor world, the object of so much insane attachment, we are about to leave; it is but misery, vanity, and folly; a phantom - the very fashion of which passeth away. [ Fenelon ]

When men neglect God, they neglect their own safety; they procure their own ruin; they fly from their own happiness; they pursue their own misery, and make haste to be undone. [ J. Mair ]

He that tears away a man's good name tears his flesh from his bones, and, by letting him live, gives him only a cruel opportunity of feeling his misery, of burying his better part, and surviving himself [ South ]

Misery is so little appertaining to our nature, and happiness so much so, that we in the same degree of illusion only lament over that which has pained us, but leave unnoticed that which has rejoiced us. [ Richter ]

Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making. [ Sydney Smith ]

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the plurality in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. [ John Ruskin ]

Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand one cannon ball than a volley of bullets. [ Colton ]

O mothers! reflect upon the power that your Maker has placed in your hands; there is no earthly influence to be compared with yours; there is no combination of causes so powerful in promoting the happiness or misery of our race, as the instructions of home! [ J. S. C. Abbott ]

The stifled hum of midnight, when traffic has lain down to rest, and the chariot wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets are bearing her to halls roofed in and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only vice and misery, to prowl or to moan like night birds, are abroad. [ Carlyle ]

In the hour of distress and misery, the eye of every mortal turns to friendship; in the hour of gladness and conviviality, what is our want? It is friendship. When the heart overflows with gratitude, or with any other sweet and sacred sentiment, what is the word to which it would give utterance? My friend. [ W. S. Landor ]

Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew. [ Keats ]

The world produces for every pint of honey a gallon of gall, for every dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for every inch of mirth an ell of moan; and as the ivy twines around the oak, so does misery and misfortune encompass the happy man. Felicity, pure and unalloyed felicity, is not a plant of earthly growth: her gardens are the skies. [ Robert Burton ]

Man is so great that his greatness appears even in the consciousness of his misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that it is misery indeed to know one's self to be miserable; but then it is greatness also. In this way, all man's miseries go. to prove his greatness. They are the miseries of a mighty potentate, of a dethroned monarch. [ Pascal ]

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all - but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered. [ Coleridge ]

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. [ Goldsmith ]