Dissatisfaction

“ When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification—first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it ”

“ They pall also from the want of that broad contrast which arises when a moiety of life is actively occupied. These negative causes of dissatisfaction are joined with the positive cause indicated—the absence of that content gained by successful achievement. ”

“ Not a few took occasion to reflect upon their satisfactions, which offset the dissatisfaction with what life had brought. Many reproached themselves that they had not done more, worked harder, had more to show, etc. ”

“ After having yielded to some temptation we feel a sense of dissatisfaction, shame, repentance, or remorse, analogous to the feelings caused by other powerful instincts or desires, when left unsatisfied or baulked. ”

“ All accumulated dissatisfactions, weariness of the world, ennui, vague disgust, a multitude of suppressed desires gush forth, like subterranean waters, under the sounding line that for the first time brings them to light. ”

“ Would I could foresee a term to our misery!—Who but yourself shall find a remedy for our misfortunes? Shall we delay, until time brings to light that which is now a secret, and the affront we have received entail on us a shame more intolerable than death itself? ”

“ The event was so totally unlooked for, and the disappointment so terrible, that people grew suddenly sick at heart, and felt as if life itself, with all its interests and charms, had been snatched from their grasp. ”

“ But the rust of disappointment has dried up his better nature; his heart is wrung with the shafts of ingratitude—all the fierce passions of his nature, hate, scorn and revenge, rise up in the one stormy outburst of his soul. ”

“ And still I could tell of failure, and failure repeated, as years went on; but I have trespassed enough on your patience to show you, in part, the causes of my discouragement. Now let me more deliberately tell you its results. You know there is a tendency in the minds of many men, when they are heavily disappointed in the main purposes of their life, to feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in mockery, to declare, that life itself is a vanity. Because it has disappointed them, they think its nature is of disappointment always, or at best, of pleasure that can be grasped by imagination only ”

“ Thus life passes away in the feverish irritation of pursuit and the certainty of disappointment. By degrees, nothing but this morbid state of feeling satisfies us: and all common pleasures and cheap amusements are sacrificed to the demon of ambition, avarice, or dissipation. ”

“ His person was now almost as changed as his fate: it was worn away by suffering, by fatigue, by internal conflicts, and faded by its exposure to the varying clime; the experience of human frailty in himself, and of human turpitude in others, marked his brow with traces of distrust and disappointment;—his enthusiasm was fled! his zeal subdued by the fatal consequences of its unsuccessful efforts! and love, and affliction, and shame, and indignation, the opprobrium he endured, and the innocence he could not establish ”

“ If now and again, owing to our own fault, our expectations are not realised, then we loudly cry out about our unhappiness. But for all that, it is certain that pain is not the rule, but only the exception. ”

“ I must be pardoned for giving these distressing details; but how otherwise can I depict the misery, moral and physical, which we are enduring? And with it all, I dare not venture to hope that we have reached the climax of our sufferings. ”

“ Into such anguish many have sunk upon some sudden diminution of their fortune, an unexpected blast of their reputation, or the loss of children or of friends. They have suffered all sensibility of pleasure to be destroyed by a single blow, have given up for ever the hopes of substituting any other object in the room of that which they lament, resigned their lives to gloom and despondency, and worn themselves out in unavailing misery. ”

“ Knowing that 'due decorum's' breach foulest disgrace will cause.
Those firm in mind will not slacken in their observance of the proprieties of life, knowing, as they do, the misery that flows from the transgression from them. ”

“ The three days that I passed in this place I reckon the most unhappy of my life; for surely it is the height of human misery to be oppressed with alienation of mind, and to be conscious of the affliction. ”

“ And we are taught what life is by despair:—
The toys, the trifles, and the petty cares,
Melt into nothingness—we know their worth;
The heart avenges every careless thought,
And makes us feel that fate is terrible. ”

“ She observed his backwardness, and commanded him to attend her. "You are not," said she, "to confound impatience with resentment, or to suppose, that I charge you with negligence, because I repine at your unsuccessfulness. I do not much wonder at your absence; I know that the unhappy are never pleasing, and that all naturally avoid the contagion of misery. To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy; for who would cloud, by adventitious grief, the short gleams of gaiety which life allows us? ”

“ When I have marked, as all must do, the disappointment that rewards the noblest efforts, the agony that attends the most generous affections, I have asked, Is it not better to waste life than to use it? ”

“ All the victims of discouragement, those who are suffering from despondency, those who are going through life disheartened, hopeless, despairing, are the authors of their own misery. They persist in killing the very thing they are pursuing, in queering their own quest by the poison of doubt. ”

“ Such men found high and low stations equally unable to satisfy the wishes of a distempered mind, and were unable to shelter themselves in the closest retreat from disappointment, solicitude, and misery. ”

“ I see her trying to get other employment, failing again and again, sinking deeper into the mire of misery and despair. Then at last the time comes when the brave, proud heart is broken; the proud, sweet eyes flinch at another day of bitterness and failure. They recognise, they accent the end. ”

“ Charnel-houses of sin and lust—sloughs of despond and regret—excess of passion offset by lack of power—dread, despair, hopelessness, shame and desperation, making a picture of misery scarcely to be conceived by any but those unfortunate beings who in the thoughtless, careless heyday of youth, or the reckless reliance on more mature vigor, have weakened, emasculated and enslaved themselves by indulgences and excesses that have borne fruit of misery, disease and desperation in after years. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one’s lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress. ”

“ Why have all men, I ask, in all ages, complained incessantly of the miseries of life?... They have no just reason, says one: these complaints proceed only from their discontented, repining, anxious disposition...And can there possibly, I reply, be a more certain foundation of misery, than such a wretched temper? ”

“ But somehow discontent fell upon him; he felt vague yearnings for his own kind, for the life he had been shut out from--a general sort of desire, which men sometimes feel, to break out and taste the prime of living. ”

“ No greater misfortune could be met with than disappointment in such expectations, which we have been by the strongest possible motives encouraged to conceive. To be disappointed in hopes we have justly relied on, would be beyond all imagination terrible in its consequences. I shudder at the very idea of the boundless woes it could not fail to be attended with, not for myself—I attach not much value to my own life,—but for thousands, nay for millions of men. ”

“ What evil greater than a life like mine!
DAPHNE.
For shame, support your misery like a man;
Live on in misery; nay, with future bliss
Contrast it, and convert it to your pleasure.
Who never suffers, never can enjoy ”

“ Would you wean a man from sensual excesses by the inevitable consequences to which they lead?—What holds more antipathy to pleasure than pain? The mind given up to self-indulgence revolts at suffering, and throws it from it as an unaccountable anomaly, as a piece of injustice when it comes. ”

“ How could they continue to cherish expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment? With what heart persist in playing venerable antics that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn balderdash that remained without effect? ”

“ We move, like marionettes, pulled by the strings of our forgotten antenatal deeds, in a magic cage, or Net, of false and hypocritical momentary seemings: and bitter disappointment is the inevitable doom of every soul, that with passion for its guide in the gloom, thinks to find in the shadows that surround it any substance, any solid satisfaction ”

“ What enthusiasm has it witnessed, what efforts engendered, what illusions dispelled, what misery produced! How bitterly have nations, as well as individuals, within its short bounds, learned wisdom by suffering—how many lessons has experience taught—how much agony has wickedness brought in its train. ”

“ Each day brought some new discomfiture, and as we met at mess, instead of having, as heretofore, some prospect of pleasure and amusement to chat over, it was only to talk gloomily over our miserable failures, and lament the dreary quarters that our fates had doomed us to. ”

“ But the mood of the unreasoning sufferer is lost in its mere failure to act successfully. It expresses its purpose only in so far as it is now conscious of its suffering. The rest of the universe it finds merely as something negative. ”

“ Mere human feelings of pity, sympathy with my too visible agitation, superadded to something of perhaps reverence for the blighting misery that was now opening its artillery upon me—for misery has a privilege, and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing—had combined to procure for me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. ”

“ But this alternative—what is it but a wild forlorn hope? A desperate step with scarce a chance of success? May not the consequences be a thousandfold worse than the worst that can come of doing nothing? ”

“ The uncertainty and vanity of human pursuits have for ever been a subject of remark.
And, if we examine the motives of human conduct and see the fallacious objects of human hope, we always perceive the constant attendance of pain, misery, and woe. ”

“ In sensitive natures, just as the ordinary blessings of life cast an aggrandized shadow and result in supreme pleasure, so their denial becomes a matter of deep pain, equally disproportionate to the cause. ”

“ Now here is a woe inflicted upon fifty people by the decease of one man—yes, here are fifty people made more or less miserable by a very natural event, the decease of a worthy soul, who would not willingly inflict a moment’s pain upon any living thing. ”

“ Far be it from us to sanction a spirit of complaint, a disposition to morbid misanthropy, which looks on nature and society with the jaundiced eye of discontent or disappointment, and which speaks of all things in the querulous tone of thankless repining. ”

“ Yet there lay, underneath his own gloomy agony, a remote consciousness of collateral affliction, such as is frequently experienced by those who may be drawn, by some temporary and present pleasure, from the contemplation of their misery. ”

“ You are able to fathom our misery in all its extent. We have been enticed from our lovely valleys under the most wicked pretences; we were promised the greatest advantages, but of all these promises nothing has ever been realized. ”

“ Though they may suffer—and capacity for suffering is a mark of greatness—they can also play and laugh, laugh at themselves and their failures, make jests of pathetic situations in which they find themselves. ”

“ What of those numberless struggling creatures to whom such happy fortune could never come, who, be their aspirations and capabilities what they might, must struggle vainly, agonise, and in the end despair? ”

“ The amusements, even the active pursuits, of most of us remain wholly within the range of uncertainty, and, therefore, are full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we expect. We look for pleasure and we [Pg 254] find pain; we shun one pain and find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so complain of in life—the disappointments, failures, mortifications which form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the world. ”

“ And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. ”