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Unhappiness Quotes

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Unhappiness Quotes

“It’s easy to put the links between the increases in mental illness, depression, ADHD, and the like, with the speed of the modern world. People never get the chance to do nothing, or when they do, they lack the control to prevent their mind from racing off in a thousand different directions. So much so that their doing nothing becomes a thousand different things and the thousand different things becomes stress, anxiety, worry and fear. Left untreated these simple everyday things become well entrenched in our psyches and start to dominate our lives. We have a chronic addiction with doing and we love to use our busyness as a stamp of our hard work and hectic lives and we get stuck in this busy trap of always doing.”

“Its little wonder anxiety, depression and other mental illness is at such a high point at this time in the world; people have little control over the mental capacities, of their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. People never get a moments silence from the constant bombardment and when they do they don’t know how to manage their thoughts so the endless barrage of noise simply continues giving them no time or space for clarity.”

“,,, let go of the real source of our unhappiness: our own self-obsession. Stress, loneliness, pessimism, financial worries, and unhappy relationships all have one thing in common: they're all about "me".”

“Cheia pentru inexplicabilul soartei noastre este setea de nefericire, adîncă şi tainică şi mai durabilă ca dorinţa zvăpăiată de fericire. De-ar predomina aceasta, cum am lămuri îndepărtarea vertiginoasă de rai şi tragedia ca o condiţie firească? Istoria întreagă e proba limpede că omul nu numai că n-a fugit de chin, dar i-a născocit mreje, pentru a nu scăpa cumva din vraja lui. Dacă n-ar fi iubit durerea, n-ar fi avut nevoie să născocească iadul — utopie a suferinţei. Şi dac-a preferat uneori cu mai multă ardoare raiul, a făcut-o pentru fantasticul lui, pentru garanţia de irealizabil — o utopie estetică. „Evenimentele“ istoriei ne arată însă clar ce a luat el în serios...”

“You probably recall the famous statement at the beginning of Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy, donning there the cloak of a calm village deity and hovering over the void full of benign toleration and loving kindness, declares from on high that all happy families resemble one another, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to Tolstoy I’m telling you that the opposite is true: Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years, each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two happinesses are alike. And in the molding of their happiness they have instilled their own suffering and humiliation. Like refining gold from ore. There is happiness in the world, Alec, even if it is more ephemeral than a dream. Indeed in your case it is beyond your reach. As a star is beyond the reach of a mole. Not “the satisfaction of approval,” not praise and advancement and conquest and domination, not submission and surrender, but the thrill of fusion. The merging of the I with another. As an oyster enfolds a foreign body and is wounded and turns it into its pearl while the warm water still surrounds and encompasses everything. You have never tasted this fusion, not once in your whole life. When the body is a musical instrument in the hands of the soul. When Other and I strike root in each other and become a single coral. And when the drip of the stalactite slowly feeds the stalagmite until the two of them become one.”

“Every bad experience is a source of unhappiness. Yet the intensity of suffering can be controlled. Just like a person who has a million-dollar bank balance is likely to get less disturbed due to loss of a few dollars, you too can easily overcome some bad incidents in your life, without losing much joy, provided you already have a great amount of happiness in your life.”

“He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others! He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs, And isn’t cured from the outside, Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink, Or a trunk not having iron bands! There being injustice is like there being death.”

“Where did you come from, lamentable quality? Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life. The mystery of this stays with me. “Don’t brood about things,” my elders said. I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside. They were all from outside—big boys Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees. All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there. I could avoid you by singing or acting. I acted in school plays but was no good at singing. Immediately after the play you were there again. You ruined the cast party. You were not a sign of confidence. You were not a sign of manliness. You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both. You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug To beat up both sides and distract them From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible! Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country, That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.”

“How is it possible to act so harshly after having been so unhappy? I'd always believed misfortune nudges open the soul, that remembering the pains we ourselves endured, our heart grows more sensitive to the suffering of others. I was wrong. Unhappiness hardens people, dulling them to their own pain; one grows accustomed to be unmoved by that of others, to remain impassive in the face of attack and therefore indifferent to blows that strike others.”

“Some people wish they were as happy as or happy like some people think they are.”

“The walls that hold my prison pent soul closed with an eternal thud. A destructive bent blossomed in the desert of my ebbing passion. I am a lonely man with no skeleton key that will allow me to escape a static penitentiary and enter a world where joy reigns. My strangeness sentenced me forever to be alone. Stranded alone, I must bear the mental lashings associated with a penal life. My relegated daily vigil consists of dragging around ankle chains and enduring a penitence period hobbled to punitive labor. There is no relief in sight; no chance exists to receive a stay of execution from self-punishment arising from a criminal spree of failure. My crazed-eyed preoccupation is to stand on my tippy toes in a private cellblock and stare down at the starkness of my picked over bones.”

“Dear God, Please relieve me of this battle that plays out in my mind. Each day a new scenario of fights, either with myself or people I’m scared will betray me. I know, life isn’t always easy, but every day I fight this battle within myself, and remain unhappy. I’m tired of being sad dear God, and tired of being unhappy because, I can’t get past my inner thoughts. Please show me the way dear God. Please clear my mind and allow me to carry true happiness, in Jesus name. Amen.”

“Money can do that if you let it--if you close your eyes and enter its dream, the one where you are well dressed, fit, successful, in love with exactly the right person. The gym I used to belong to cost $30 a month, but sound judgment gets lost so easily in unhappiness: the new price seemed justifiable because I would have paid almost any price to become a new person.”

“The ego might resist change until a person’s level of discomfort becomes unbearable. A person can employ logic to overcome the ego’s defense mechanism and intentionally integrate needed revisions in a person’s obsolete or ineffective beliefs and behavior patterns. The subtle sense that something is amiss in a person’s life can lead to a gradual or quick alteration in a person’s conscious thoughts and outlook on life. Resisting change can prolong unhappiness whereas implementing change can establish internal harmony and instate joy in a person’s life.”

“Life has a tendency to provide a person with what they need in order to grow. Our beliefs, what we value in life, provide the roadmap for the type of life that we experience. A period of personal unhappiness reveals that our values are misplaced and we are on the wrong path. Unless a person changes their values and ideas, they will continue to experience discontentment.”

“Being jealous does nothing. It turns you into a person who’s unable to feel genuine happiness, and tarnishes every accomplishment when it’s used to measure your sense of worth on a made-up scale. You hear about a friend’s promotion (in an industry that probably isn’t yours) and feel like you will never venture past your existing achievements. You hear someone from high school is getting married and assume that you never will. You discover the guy you worked retail with in 2006 has a new apartment, and you sit wherever you happen to live and actively resent the space you loved five minutes ago. And feelings like will always come up; it’s just up to you to say “fuck off.” So, while I’d like to say you should just decide not to be jealous, and that we’re all in this together so let’s remember that and be best friends, I know that isn’t realistic because jealousy is immune to reason and logic…If I feel myself slipping into a jealousy wormhole when I see someone else shining, I remember that to gauge my self-worth based on someone else’s accomplishments is a one-way ticket to bitterness.”

“For a sane person to sincerely be happy that someone has succeeded, they have to either be profiting or likely to profit from that person’s success, or be that person.”

“She thought how curious it was that responses such as this--emotions, even--could run parallel with but quite separate from unhappiness. I am unhappy all the time, she thought, and that is a total occupation, but some other part of me still goes on working. I still see that things are beautiful, or significant, and that prompts a feeling. I can be angry, or pleased. But all this with detachment, as though it happened to someone else. It is as though half of me were some stranger, living independently.”

“We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.”