Top 100 Quotes About Misfortune

#1. After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#2. I do a TV show about a priest in London, and he is also slightly beleaguered and is subject to fate and misfortune and daily difficulty.

Tom Hollander

#3. Misfortune comes to people who live only on the memory of their past grandeur.

Louise Colet

#4. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.

Eknath Easwaran

#5. Misfortune simply is. And when you wall it off, you do not have a clear conscience, because perhaps you are supposed to dedicate all your efforts and all your attention to it. And all you can say in your own defense is 'I want to live.

Czeslaw Milosz

#6. I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#7. We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down, Trot!

Charles Dickens

#8. It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.

Henri Poincare

#9. The skies give no warning when they fall.

Marty Rubin

#10. Milton Friedman's misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#11. The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.

Austin O'Malley

#12. Good fortune is as light as a feather, but nobody knows how to pick it up. Misfortune is as heavy as earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of it's way.

Zhuangzi

#13. You see misery, you see misfortune, you see pain, you see suffering. It's all part of the fatalistic way of looking at life.

Ravi Zacharias

#14. The swift wind of compromise is a lot more devastating than the sudden jolt of misfortune.

Charles R. Swindoll

#15. Faith has its price. When misfortune strikes the true believer, he assumes he has done something to deserve punishment, but isn't quite certain what. The realist, recognizing that he lives in a Darwinian universe, is simply grateful to have made it to another sunset.

Jack McDevitt

#16. The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#17. No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Susie Orbach

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

Anne Carson

#19. One of the advantages or disadvantages of the way in which we live in these modern days is that we are ceasing to feel. That is to say we do not permit ourselves to be affected by either death or misfortune, provided these natural calamities leave our own persons unscathed.

Marie Corelli

#20. A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

Marguerite Yourcenar

#21. Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history.

William S. Burroughs

#22. Friendship is the medicine for all misfortune; but ingratitude dries up the fountain of all goodness.

Cardinal Richelieu

#23. The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days ... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

Simone De Beauvoir

#24. The danger from lightning is gone when the thunder is heard, and the worst is over when misfortune has arrived.

Ivan Panin

#25. What Cicero said of men-that they are like wines, age souring the bad, and bettering the good-we can say of misfortune, that it has the same effect upon them.

Jean Paul

#26. Time doesn't heal all, no matter what they say. And tragedies don't make you stronger. That's another popular lie. They just make you more hardened, less surprised by misfortune.

Kim Hooper

#27. If, on the other hand, in the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune.

Sun Tzu

#28. Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old, she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen.

Jane Austen

#29. The constant man loses not his virtue in misfortune. A torch may point towards the ground, but its flame will still point upwards.

Bhartrhari

#30. A man convinced of his own merit will accept misfortune as an honor, for thus can he persuade others, as well as himself, that he is a worthy target for the arrows of fate.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#31. Do not you see that every misfortune is misconduct; that every honour is desert; that every effort is an insolence of your own? ... You carry your fortune in your own hand.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#32. If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

Simone Weil

#33. Patience cannot remove, but it can always dignify and alleviate, misfortune.

Laurence Sterne

#34. Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#35. Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

Plato

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

Washington Irving

#37. All men wish to be captains, but few men wish to shoulder the burden of decision, and in coming here with these others, I had staked a claim that I must wall against misfortune.

Louis L'Amour

#38. The fortune that you feel you don't deserve is heaven's compensation for the misfortunes she feels you didn't deserve

Agona Apell

#39. Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

Victor Hugo

#40. The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator's place and laugh at his own misfortune.

Bert Williams

#41. What are you supposed to do if you become part of the suffering? You'd be completely lost. On the contrary, beauty remains, even in misfortune.

Anne Frank

#42. Contentment travels rarely with fortune, but follows virtue even in misfortune.

Marie Leszczynska

#43. It is often a comfort in misfortune to know our own fate.
[Lat., Saepe calamitas solatium est nosse sortem suam.]

Quintus Curtius Rufus

#44. No stranger to misfortune myself, I have learned to relieve the sufferings of others.

Virgil

#45. They aren't ugly." I bit my lip, trying to find the right words. "more like beautiful things that have had the misfortune of being broken.

Danielle L. Jensen

#46. The greatest misfortune that can come to a human being is to lose his inner peace. No outer force can rob him of it. It is his own thoughts, his own actions, that rob him of it.

Sri Chinmoy

#47. Cast between the extremes of happiness and misfortune, uncertainty is a cruel torment.

Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

#48. Adversity is the touchstone of character: it is not in success but in misfortune that hidden powers bear fruit.

Alec-Tweedie

#49. A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Jane Austen

#50. Beauty remains, even in misfortune. If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.

Anne Frank

#51. Misfortune is a stepping stone for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, treasure for the skillful man, an abyss for the feeble.

Honore De Balzac

#52. The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#53. But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging. There

Jane Austen

#54. No excuses and no sob stories. Life is full of excuses if you're looking. I have no time to gripe over misfortune. I don't waste time looking back.

Junior Seau

#55. I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

Ernst Junger

#56. No one has the right to be sorry for himself for a misfortune that strikes everyone.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#57. One must not try to trick misfortune, but resign oneself to it with good grace.

Aristophanes

#58. I never wanted to find my birth parents - if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive ...
I had no idea that you could like your parents or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

Jeanette Winterson

#59. People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right, writes no guarantee against misfortune.

William McFee

#60. I'm a fruit of misfortune.

Nely Cab

#61. MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

Anonymous

#62. It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.

William Hazlitt

#63. The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.

Blaise Pascal

#64. When the two become the one
And the inside outside, the outside in
So that the male be not male nor the female female
Then will you see me.

Wesley Stace

#65. What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.

Soren Kierkegaard

#66. On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.

Amy Tan

#67. Does misfortune follow you everywhere, Miz Powell?" "Not normally," She pursed the lips that he found increasingly fascinating. "Why do you ask?"
"Because I'm thinking it might be prudent for me to increase my insurance before I drive you anywhere.

Victoria Vane

#68. The other farmers sympathised in principle, but they did not at first give him much help. At heart, each of them was secretly wondering whether he could not somehow turn Jones's misfortune to his own advantage.

George Orwell

#69. God is at the helm even when you think your ship is sinking. Just keep trusting that the captain knows more about where you're heading than you do, and eventually you'll get where you need to be.

Kevin Alan Milne

#70. After rain comes sunshine; After darkness comes the glorious dawn. There is no sorrow without its alloy of joy; there is no joy without its admixture of sorrow. Behind the ugly terrible mask of misfortune lies the beautiful soothing countenance of prosperity. So, tear the mask!

Obafemi Awolowo

#71. Happiness or misfortune are prescribed by law of Heaven, but their source comes from ourselves.

Nguyen Du

#72. Oh! what does grief matter - what does misfortune matter, if one knows how to be happy?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#73. To have a right estimate of a man's character, we must see him in misfortune.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#74. Misfortune is never invited. And it comes and sits at the table without permission and it eats, leaving nothing but bones.

Jacques Roumain

#75. The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.

Simone De Beauvoir

#76. There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

Thomas Mann

#77. There is no reason why an individual, who has the misfortune to become insane, should, on that account, be deprived of any comfort or even luxury...

Thomas Story Kirkbride

#78. In a life filled with great good fortune of health, of creativity, of friends, living in safety and privilege with the loving partner. There was just one bit of misfortune in his life and that was that Peter Morrow seemed to have no idea how very fortunate he was.

Louise Penny

#79. The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.

Peter Nivio Zarlenga

#80. Misfortune can force you into doing things you should be doing anyway. Lessons come from adversity. Anything can happen to anyone ... You can find a new lease on life - more meaning than you thought possible in simple things ... Let go. Live in the moment. Go forward.

Christopher Reeve

#81. There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Lafcadio Hearn

#82. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.

Plato

#83. Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

Epicurus

#84. When people really deteriorate, their only contribution is malicious joy in the misfortune of others.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#85. Mexico doesn't have an emperor." "That is Mexico's misfortune, for all of the greatest countries have emperors.

Daniel Polansky

#86. There was, I think, a prevailing
impression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune was
the result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger.

Bret Harte

#87. Misfortune wandering the same track lights now upon one and now upon another.

Aeschylus

#88. Your dear baby has died innocent and blameless, and has been called away by an all wise and merciful Creator, most probably from a life to misery and misfortune, and most certainly to one of happiness and bliss.

George Mason

#89. In misfortune we often mistake dejection for constancy; we bear it without daring to look on it; like cowards, who suffer themselves to be murdered without resistance.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

#90. Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

Aristotle.

#91. Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.

Albert Camus

#92. It was a rebus of heartbreak, misfortune a dog could parse.

Jonathan Lethem

#93. That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.

Stefan Zweig

#94. As drops of bitter medicine, though minute, may have a salutary force, so words, though few and painful, uttered seasonably, may rouse the prostrate energies of those who meet misfortune with despondency.

J. K. Bharavi

#95. It's the misfortune of German authors that not a single one of them dares to expose his true character. Everyone thinks that he has to be better than he is.

Franz Grillparzer

#96. The misfortune is, that religious learning is too often rather considered as an act of the memory than of the heart and affections; as a dry duty, rather than a lively pleasure.

Hannah More

#97. After making a mistake or suffering a misfortune, the man of genius always gets back on his feet.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#98. Misfortune seemed to hang on him like day-before smoke.

Michael Punke

#99. Among other causes of misfortune which your not being armed brings upon you, it makes you despised ...

Niccolo Machiavelli

#100. It is just as often a great misfortune to be the child of the rich as it is to be the child of the poor. Wealth has its misfortunes. Too much, too great opportunity and advantage given to a child has its misfortunes.

Clarence Darrow

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