unhappiness Quotes

“If you decide to just go with the flow, you’ll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You’ll end up doing what everyone else is doing.”

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”

“I didn’t want to cause any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better that he wasn’t here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.”

“Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.”

“... after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.”

“Evelyn was a miserable and resentful wife before she met Mrs. Threadgoode at the Rose Terrance Nursing Home. Before their meeting, she often thought about committing suicide because she was so unhappy and depressed with the way her life was going.”

“For not observing the state of another man’s soul, scarce was ever any man known to be unhappy. Tell whosoever they be that intend not, and guide not by reason and discretion the motions of their own souls, they must of necessity be unhappy.”

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”

″‘Oh darling,’ Brett said, ‘I’m so miserable.’ I had that feeling of going through something that has all happened before. ‘You were happy a minute ago.‘”

“As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, ‘Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity.‘”

“Later that night when the kids were in bed I realized exactly what was bugging me: the idea of Lou Ann reading magazines for child-raising tips and recipes and me coming home grouchy after a hard day’s work. We were like some family on a TV commercial, with names like Myrtle and Fred. I could just hear us striking up a conversation about air fresheners.”

“I knew it wasn’t fair, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. And after a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn’t like who I’d become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.”

″‘All this--’ she exclaimed, the sweep of her arm including the deepening blue of the sky, the shining lake in the distance, the snow-covered mountain far to the north. ‘So much! You must look at it all, Daniel, not just at the unhappy things.‘”

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”

“That little book she carried all around the whole house ... is at the whole root of this whole business. ”

“The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”

“Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”

“I sensed vaguely that she was going to pay dearly for it all. . . .”

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.”

“Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people.”

“Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness.”

“No matter what you have or get, you won’t be happy. You will always be looking for something else that promises greater fulfillment, that promises to make your incomplete sense of self complete and fill that sense of lack you feel within.”

“Hendrika was an unhappy cow.... All winter and all summer she did nothing but eat.”

″ Hendrika loved Mr. Hofstra so she ate more to please him. But she was unhappy.”

“The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with.”

“She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.”

“You see, there were kids at school—they hated their parents or they hated other people so much that you knew—it wasn’t just being angry, it was hating. I can’t explain what I mean, but I could feel the unhappiness.”

“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

“There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.”

“Why had he wanted to be rich, or to feel rich? Was he an unhappy mouse before? Didn’t he see the King himself often looking sad? Was anyone completely happy?”

″‘O, unhappy people!’ she cried. ‘Tomorrow will bring sorrow, but the day after will bring laughter! Prepare to mingle your colours!‘”

“The obvious connection between personal unhappiness and the tendency to easily believe the incredible is the most interesting conclusion of this study.”

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon,for each day to have a new and different sun.”

In the two years Halinka has spent in a home for girls, she has learned not to hope for anything, and to hold tightly to what she has.

“In America they distrust unhappy people.”

“I suppose what I am saying is that Nikolas was a boy who believed in happiness, the way he believed in elves and trolls and pixies, but he had never actually seen an elf or a troll or a pixie, and he hadn’t really seen proper happiness either.”

“He was a better officer than many who vaunted themselves illustrious, the best of all officers, in fact. Yet there he was, walking unhappily in the night.”

“Hatred is the most mysterious and painful phenomenon to the unhappy person who is the object of it...”

“Sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.”

It was not a happy evening, for though they sewed as usual, while their mother read aloud from Bremer, Scott, or Edgeworth, something was wanting, and the sweet home peace was disturbed.

“When I wished to retire into a convent, you remember how angry you were with me?” A tear trembled in the eye of the invalid. “Well,” continued Valentine, “the reason of my proposing it was that I might escape this hateful marriage, which drives me to despair.”

Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man, who, like Satan, thought himself for an instant equal to God, but who now acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom. Perhaps those prayers may soften the remorse he feels in his heart. As for you, Morrel, this is the secret of my conduct towards you. There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.

“I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and with my life.

“I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be.”

It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its one dominant anxiety, towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a range of mountains, never disappeared from my view.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married again.

They seemed to have realised his good intention and had only been alarmed briefly. Now they all looked at him in unhappy silence.

“It’s not unhappiness, or low spirits, but much worse. As though everything that was good in me was all hidden away, and nothing was left but the most loathsome. Come, how am I to tell you?”

“My dear,” was Mrs Smith’s reply, “there was nothing else to be done. I considered your marrying him as certain, though he might not yet have made the offer, and I could no more speak the truth of him, than if he had been your husband. My heart bled for you, as I talked of happiness; and yet he is sensible, he is agreeable, and with such a woman as you, it was not absolutely hopeless. He was very unkind to his first wife. They were wretched together. But she was too ignorant and giddy for respect, and he had never loved her. I was willing to hope that you must fare better.”

“If you reach a line you won’t overstep, you will be unhappy... and if you overstep it, maybe you will be still unhappier....”

If ever at any moment she had been asked what she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of her happiness and her unhappiness.

“but I have been so horribly unhappy there that my heart is almost closed to hope.”

In short, Miss Cunegonde, I have had experience, I know the world; therefore I advise you to divert yourself, and prevail upon each passenger to tell his story; and if there be one of them all, that has not cursed his life many a time, that has not frequently looked upon himself as the unhappiest of mortals, I give you leave to throw me headforemost into the sea.”