Best 116 quotes in «misfortune quotes» category

Acceptance. Good and bad, Fortune and misfortune, Pleasure and pain, I want it all, Because it's mine.

According to Islam, whenever we are struck by illness or misfortune or someone hurts us, there is a higher purpose behind it, which we may not understand at the time,’ one of them said to me. ‘That’s where trust comes in. Through suffering, God helps us to better ourselves and make good our mistakes. It is a form of purification and also God’s way of testing the strength of our faith and the goodness of our character.’ Another lady suggested I look on the bright side. ‘Suffering draws us closer to God and that is our aim in life,’ she said. Then she quoted Rumi who had said, ‘It is pain that draws man to his Lord, because when he is well, he doesn’t remember the Lord.’ I tried to look at the positive and believe that there was a higher, spiritual perspective on what I had just been through, and all the advice I was given helped me a lot. But it took quite a while for my heart to catch up with my mind.

According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design.

And it’s not because I’m tortured Or by some delirium swayed That I conjure up misfortune: It is just my trade.

And it was at this time that Sir Myles died of his hurt, for it is often so that death and misfortune befall some, whiles others laugh and sing for hope and joy, as though such grievous things as sorrow and death could never happen in the world wherein they live.

And love is two misfortunes which together do an happiness .(Et l’amour, c’est deux malheurs - Qui ensemble font un bonheur)

...and what creature, after all, is more precious, more attractive in the eyes of men, than the woman who has cherished, respected, and cultivated all earthly virtues, only to find, at every step, both misfortune and sorrow?

A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune.

A gloomy view of things is at least one misfortune you can avoid.

As to everyone on whom I placed my hand, no misfortune ever befell him, because my heart was sealed and my counsel excellent. But as to any fool, any wretch, who stands up in opposition. I shall give according as he gives. “O woe,” will be said of one who is accused by me, his will take water like a boat. For I am a champion without peer! THE FIRST PART OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANKHTIFI

Another human's adversity lends us perspective and leads to a diminution of our own exaggerated misfortunes.

Because misfortune does not wait idly by until we are prepared for it.

Au Rwanda, comme dans le reste du monde, le Malheur tisse inlassablement la trame de la vie humaine : la mort frappe les petits enfants, la peste décime les vaches, la sécheresse provoque la famine, la guerre ravage les collines. Bien sûr, on voudrait savoir d’où provient le Malheur et surtout qui nous l’envoie. Les suspects sont nombreux.

As a child, I cried because I had no toy until I met a child who had no bread.

Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.

Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.

But then again...perhaps the whole human race is cursed, and I'm simply in the lower echelon and therefore lose everything first.

Death always knew how to connect vice with misfortune.

Challenge makes you aware of your strengths as you are forced to fight back. Misfortune’s light shines on your weaker attributes, but this light is hardly ethereal or godlike. It can be an out of control fire that illuminates the demons you hide within yourself.

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.

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

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.

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.

Don't say I'm lucky. Ever.

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

Every misfortune is a fortune.

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

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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?

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

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

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)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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