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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Unhappiness

The good time when I was unhappy.

Mme. Sophie Arnould.

The wretched hasten to hear of their own miseries.

Seneca.

I believe that man to be wretched whom none can please.

Martial.

Present sufferings seem far greater to men than those they merely dread.

Livy.

The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so.

Henry Home.

Have patience and endure; this unhappiness will one day be beneficial.

Ovid.

True happiness is exotic; its birthplace is in heaven; unhappiness is of native growth.

Du Cœur.

Oh, give me thy hand, one writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!

Shakespeare.

What thing so good which not some harm may bring?

Earl of Sterling.

A perverse temper and fretful disposition will, wherever they prevail, render any state of life whatsoever unhappy.

Cicero.

What do people mean when they talk about unhappiness? It is not so much unhappiness as impatience that from time to time possesses men, and then they choose to call themselves miserable.

Goethe.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite.

Carlyle.

When men are unhappy, they do not imagine they can ever cease to be so; and when some calamity has fallen on them, they do not see how they can get rid of it. Nevertheless, both arrive; and the gods have ordered it so, in the end men seek it from the gods.

Epictetus.