Best 116 quotes in «misfortune quotes» category

Don't let the mist of circumstances block your imagination and stop you from making new beginnings.

Don't say I'm lucky. Ever.

Dread was always with her, an alarm system in her head, alert to her next disaster. Despite being resigned to a life of misfortune, she became resourceful. She grudgingly noticed that things always worked out, even when she claimed defeat. An inconvenient truth, yet it was right there, in her face, betraying her self-punishments and assumptions. She kept overcoming things, dammit, aggravating herself. She still felt so much joy, despite her efforts to be miserable. Her life was full of miracles and spectacles that she was afraid to rely on so she didn’t know how to enjoy, how to be thankful, without guilt. She didn’t want to win and she didn’t want to lose. Ambiguity intrigued her and she found passion in the gaps between hope and despair.

During her life, Veronika had noticed that a lot of people she knew would talk about the horrors in other people's lives as if they were genuinely trying to help them, but the truth was that they took pleasure in the suffering of others, because that made them believe they were happy and that life had been generous with them.

Even at such a tender age, I knew that life is lived in leftovers, account ledgers, and timetables rather than in the Platonic sphere of perfect theory. I couldn't float sylphlike around Love Hall in the flowing robes of indeterminacy for the rest of my life, however much I wished there to be no change. I had to accept my responsibilities and, at least in the eyes of the world and at least for the time being, nail my colors to a mast. Unless I wished to appear a strange wonder for the rest of time, caked in circus makeup covering the truth inches beneath, the mast would be male.

Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, at every moment of our life: all other influences are temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle says: It is not wealth but character that lasts. And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves; for fortune may always change, but not character. Therefore, subjective blessings — a noble nature, a capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and most important elements in happiness; so that we should be more intent on promoting and preserving such qualities than on the possession of external wealth and external honor.

Every misfortune is a fortune.

For this reason, it is well said that misfortune is sometimes good for something, for it teaches at the same time that it hurts.

Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune means an acid test of friendship. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor.

Everything would turn out exactly the same, and I would return here for a second time, and then, if I was fool enough, a third time, waiting, as now, for my other to touch the canvas. And it would be progressively worse, because though I would know slightly more each time, I would still be powerless to change my fate. Perhaps I would be unaware of the previous decision, yet choose again to come back. Or worse, I would become aware that I was inadvertently repeating the same mistake for a horrific split second just after I made the decision. Infinity was terrifying. Its abyss makes my skin crawl.

I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another.

Great minds have purpose, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.

... he could always materialise and sort things out personally. But he liked people to believe that all the bad things that happened to them were just fate and destiny. It was one of the few things that cheered him up.

History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.

I began to feel lighthearted. Don't ever do that; it tempts some dark and evil force abroad in the universe.

I close my eyes, wondering whether we are ever truly blindsided by misfortune. Or, somehow, somewhere, in the form of empathy or worry or a premonition deep within ourselves, do we feel it coming?

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

I had tried, as best I could, to forget the people who had said they loved me, and I had been able to do so only by replacing their memory with hatred for them and their crimes. Time is no healer. It scabs the wound until the injury is forgotten, but the infection festers, eating away, spreading.

For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without regretting the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

I leaned back and glimpsed the stars, the same stories again but written in the sky.

I no longer believe that people are born without virtue. It gets beaten out. Misfortune threshes our souls as a flail threshes wheat, and the lightest parts of ourselves are scattered to the wind.

I'm as lucky as a bed of oysters on cioppino night.

In Book VIII of the Odyssey we read that the gods weave misfortunes into the pattern of events to make a song for future generations to sing. ---------- Στην Όγδοη Ραψωδία της Οδύσσειας διαβάζουμε ότι οι θεοί κλώθουν τις συμφορές για να μη λείπουν από τις μελλούμενες γενιές θέματα για τραγούδια. (μτφ Δ. Καλοκύρης)

If the sky falls, there'll be a bigger sky behind it.

In terms of the real quality of a human being, only when suffering comes, when pain comes, does a man stand up as a human being. You can see great human beings surface only when the society is really suffering. When India was under the oppression of British rulers, how many wonderful people stood up? Where are they now? They have just fallen back into their comforts, that's all. All those Ghandis, Patels, Tilaks are still there, but they're dormant. When pain came, they all became alive. They left everything behind and stood up as giants. Where are they now? This is the human misfortune that still there's not enough intelligence in the world that human beings will rise to their peaks when everything is well. They wait for calamities.

... in the life of every man there was one great good fortune and one misfortune of equal force.

It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune, such works always bring consolation, and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost.

It is necessary to accept all the terrible things and not be crushed by them.

It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.

It's fictitious to believe that we can intuitively navigate misfortune with the inherent skills we've come into the world with.

I’ve found I still serve a purpose. I remind people to pray, to calculate the odds, to thank the fates, the gods, good karma, whatever it was that made this happen to me and not them. I’m in the worst sort of club. The one no one else wants to be in.

Inspiration gives us courage to keep going in the face of illness, misfortune, and loss.

It would be ridiculous to hold your breath and blame others for your inability to breathe. In the same sense, it is ridiculous to live an unaligned life and blame God for your misfortune.

Maybe when we face a tragedy, someone, somewhere is preventing a bigger tragedy from happening.

I was breathing life into the book through my hand, and the book was breathing back out through me into the world. And what was a book but leather? And what was leather but animal skin? And what was paper but a tree, and vellum but lamb? And what was I but an idea?

Little by little they all gathered around him, entering through the cracks like moonbeams...[b]ut once the wind of misfortune blows, people disperse like little clouds around the moon when the wind blows off the mountains.

Many people are the cause of their own misfortune in life, and they either blame the devil for it or hang it on God.

Misfortune never comes alone. It's surrounded by bodyguards.

... misfortune and creativity go together.

Misfortune may pave the path to fortune, with Faith.

Misfortune never comes singly. It's surrounded by bodyguards.

Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror.

Nesreća je za čoveka što ostavlja iza sebe noć kojoj je on dao oblik.

Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.

Of course I'm trying to trick you!" Olaf cried. "That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everybody runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out. I can be king of Olaf-land, and you three can be my new henchfolk." "We don't want to be your henchfolk," Klaus said. "We just want to be safe." "Nowhere in the world is safe," Count Olaf said.

Pray for God's mercy in the moment of misfortune.

Sad was the Hour, and luckless was the Day. - Eclogue the Second: Hassan; or the Camel-driver

She couldn’t help but wonder at the events of recent days, and at how—even in the face of such misfortune, there was so much good,

Sometimes misfortune brings opportunity