Top 100 Human Misery Quotes
#1. Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of.
Phineas Quimby
#2. I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.
John Biggins
#3. Sometimes I have thought that human misery goes far beyond human imagination, - imagination has its limits, and misery, like the vast seas, appears to be without end.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#5. I believe that this neglected, wounded, inner child of the past is the major source of human misery.
John Bradshaw
#6. Wherever you find human misery, you find lawyers, either causing it or making a profit from it.
Peter F. Hamilton
#7. Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides
#8. Is there anything more true than human pain? Is there anything more sincere than the cry for help from those who suffer? Only a great wave of mankind's pity can surmount an immense wave of human misery?
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
#9. The so-called Real World. Human misery and sadness. Blind politics and general cruelty.
Tanith Lee
#10. The history of empires is the history of human misery.
Edward Gibbon
#11. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
Isaac Asimov
#12. The principal sources of human misery may fairly be said to lie in the over-possession, under-possession, and the unwise use of economic goods.
Georgia Harkness
#13. When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanor Roosevelt
#14. I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.
Sue Monk Kidd
#15. Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.
Isaac Bonewits
#16. The state of your heart dictates whether you harbor a grudge or give grace, seek self-pity or seek Christ, drink human misery or taste God's mercy.
Max Lucado
#17. The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.
Arthur C. Brooks
#18. The various torments of life worked in shifts so that one was always on duty. Thus was human misery extracted day and night like water and oil are pulled from the earth. Thus was the toll inflicted, the price one paid for being unwittingly born.
Hugh Howey
#19. The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so
as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the
universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.
Albert Camus
#20. As mercy is God's goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is his goodness directed toward human debt and demerit.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#21. Often the depths of human misery can be found amongst legions of happy people.
Russ Woody
#22. The all of God, the totality of His immensity, is known in the human heart through encountering divine mercy. The search for the Lord within is the effort to find those places in the substance of the soul where God's mercy and human misery touch each other, where one has bearing on the other.
Anthony Lilles
#23. But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse
Cormac McCarthy
#24. The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.
Simone Weil
#25. There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
Gilles Deleuze
#27. My medical students. Two cups of human misery in short white coats. One is male and the other one female, and they both have names. That's all I can ever remember about them.
Josh Bazell
#28. Human misery is too great for men to do without faith.
Heinrich Heine
#29. Even when they're not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.
Tom Chatfield
#30. Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.
John Ortberg
#31. Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster.
Frederick Lenz
#32. "Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.
Dallas Willard
#33. You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.
Norman Borlaug
#34. It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.
Simone Weil
#35. The need for gain, and advantage over others, is one of the chief driving forces behind all human misery.
Bryant McGill
#36. Radical servanthood challenges us, while attempting persistently to overcome poverty, hunger, illness, and any other form of human misery, to reveal the gentle presence of our compassionate God in the midst of our broken world.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#37. It made me feel silenced, lonely, and far away from myself, a feeling that I believe, next to extreme nausea sans vomiting, is the depth of human misery.
Lena Dunham
#38. When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us.
John Howard Griffin
#39. Flavius's foot catches on a metal grate over a circular opening in the floor, and my stomach contracts when I think of why a room would need a drain. The stains of human misery that must have been hosed off these white tiles ...
Suzanne Collins
#40. What antidote can there be for an idea that popular and poisonous? Revenge provides revenge, which is sure to provide revenge, forming an endless chain of human misery. Here's the antidote: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Amen.
Kurt Vonnegut
#41. Buddha, tends to suggest a different solution: Wanting is the cause of all human misery. Learn to want less. Accept that life is painful. Face the existential emptiness that is an essential part of our nature.
Anonymous
#42. If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
Michael Harrington
#43. Religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.
Tom Robbins
#44. Throughout history, adultery has had few rivals as a cause of murder and human misery. The reason we tend to resemble our mates is that many of us are looking for someone who reminds us of our parent or sibling of the opposite sex, who in turn resembles us.
Jared Diamond
#45. The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.
Blaise Pascal
#47. Whoever increases the sum of human joy, is a worshiper. He who adds to the sum of human misery, is a blasphemer.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#48. Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. Never before has man had such a great capacity to control his own environment, to end hunger, poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and human misery. We have the power to make the best generation of mankind in the history of the world.
John F. Kennedy
#50. Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
Carl Sagan
#51. I find that the whole weight of relieving human misery and distress falls on the shoulders of those Heretics and Infidels; and though great part of this distress has been occasioned by those ravening wolves' hopeful converts.
Anne Royall
#52. Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
Jonah Goldberg
#53. Politicians need human misery ... Government's a disease masquerading as its own cure.
L. Neil Smith
#54. If your knowledge teaches you not to rise above human weakness and misery and lead your fellow man on the right path, you are indeed a man of little worth and will remain such till Judgment Day.
Khalil Gibran
#55. Tradition can not justify such misery. Surely people can enjoy themselves at a non-animal circus with exciting human acts instead?
Claire McClennan
#56. According to a Pew poll, 49% of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? it is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverishment, and human slaughter. That's what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it's benign.
David Horowitz
#57. Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.
Alexander Smith
#58. In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.
Frank Herbert
#59. Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#60. All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of action.
Aristotle.
#61. But human withdrawal is a very painful and lonely process, because it forces us to face directly our own condition in all its beauty as well as misery.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#62. Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies-hunger, misery, and despair.
Harry S. Truman
#63. I've been quite happy. Look, here are my proofs. Remember that I am indifferent to discomforts which would harass other folk. What do the circumstances of life matter if your dreams make you lord paramount of time and space?
W. Somerset Maugham
#64. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.
Victor Hugo
#65. He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#66. My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.
James Hillman
#67. The individual is the little conditioned, miserable, frustrated entity, satisfied with his little gods and his little traditions, whereas a human being is concerned with the total welfare, the total misery and total confusion of the world.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#68. as the most stupendous objects in nature are but vast collections of minute particles, so the slightest and least considered trifles make up the sum of human happiness or misery.
Charles Dickens
#69. The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.
Annie Besant
#70. All human happiness and misery take the form of action.
Aristotle.
#71. Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Aldous Huxley
#72. Half the misery of human life might be extinguished if men would alleviate the general curse they lie under by mutual offices of compassion, benevolence, and humanity.
Joseph Addison
#73. The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.
Barbara Walters
#74. When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.
Cyril Connolly
#75. Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
Muhammad Yunus
#76. Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.
Rosamund Pike
#77. The human heart is certainly an abyss of misery and sin, but God lies in its depths.
Jacques Philippe
#78. It is my observation that all human hearts are the same and that their ultimate desire is also the same. This soul wants happiness, perfect and pure happiness, because only then will all desires end. As long as desire exists misery exists, because with desire there can be no peace.
Rajneesh
#79. Like my parents, I have never been a regular church member or churchgoer. It doesn't seem plausible to me that there is the kind of God who watches over human affairs, listens to prayers, and tries to guide people to follow His precepts - there is just too much misery and cruelty for that.
Benjamin Spock
#80. The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be accomplished by a simple elevation of level.
Victor Hugo
#81. Dialogue is about freeing human beings from the beliefs and attitudes that make human beings miserable.
Oli Anderson
#82. I have always thought that people are, by nature, nomadic, but they've built up anti-human constructs to keep them in place and then they pop pills to mask their misery and look for ways to distract from their emptiness.
Jackie Haze
#83. Is it possible to cause so much misery to another human being, simply by being oneself? she wondered, feeling a reflection of that misery. No help for it; she must continue to be herself.
Amy Witting
#84. This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.
Margaret E. Knight
#85. The questions you ask consistently will create either enervation or enjoyment, indignation or inspiration, misery or magic. Ask the questions that will uplift your spirit and push you along the path of human excellence
Tony Robbins
#86. Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#87. The cure for the greatest part of human miseries is not radical, but palliative.
Samuel Johnson
#88. It's like the human race has been programmed for misery.
Tom Perrotta
#89. To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for you inner state at any given moment. That means now
Eckhart Tolle
#90. Dante's poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not so much about the misery of hell as it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.
Dan Brown
#91. Wherever there's a happy vacuum caused by an absence of misery, human beings rush in to fill it.
Harvey Stanbrough
#92. However important the struggle is and however much misery and poverty and degradation exist, we know that it cannot be more important than one human life.
Cesar Chavez
#93. He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
#94. The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father! from a full heart . . . the refusal to look up to God as our father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery.
John Eldredge
#95. I could see it on the faces of people as they passed. I would smile to share my joy, but it was AS IF I upset them with my happiness. In Confusion they would reply with a negative remark. Hoping it would spark a new chain of negative thoughts in me bringing me down to their level misery.
Bethany Brookbank
#96. ...the ravenous monsters men called reporters; sub-human vermin who feed off misery and created it wherever they went.
Christopher G. Nuttall
#97. Since trifles make the sum of human things, And half our misery from our foibles springs.
Hannah More
#98. Employment, which Galen calls 'Nature's Physician,' is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery.
Robert A. Burton
#99. Once the truth is denied to human beings, it is pure illusion to try to set them free. Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.
Pope John Paul II
#100. To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress.
Charlie Chaplin
